In an artist's life, death is perhaps not the most difficult thing.

Taken at face value, the line suggests that for an artist the greater ordeal may be living—enduring poverty, isolation, misunderstanding, illness, and the daily struggle to keep working—rather than the finality of death itself. It frames artistic life as a sustained trial in which emotional and material hardships can feel more taxing than mortality. At the same time, the phrasing implies a grim hierarchy of suffering: death is not minimized as trivial, but repositioned as one difficulty among others, perhaps even a release compared with the burdens of creation and survival. The sentiment aligns with common narratives about van Gogh’s hardships, though the exact wording’s authenticity is uncertain.