Vincent van Gogh
The passion of colour and brushstroke.
Van Gogh painted for only ten years and sold almost nothing. His letters to his brother Theo describe every picture. Today he is one of the world’s best-loved artists.
Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in Zundert in the southern Netherlands, the son of a pastor. He worked first for the art dealers Goupil in The Hague, London and Paris, then as a teacher and as a lay preacher among miners in the Borinage in Belgium. Only in 1880, at the age of 27, did he decide to become an artist. He was largely self-taught.
In his first years he painted peasants and labourers in dark earth colours. The principal work of that period is The Potato Eaters of 1885, which is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 1886 he moved in with his brother Theo in Paris. There he encountered Impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints, and his palette brightened dramatically.
In February 1888 he moved to Arles in Provence. Over a little more than a year there he painted some of his best-known works, among them several versions of Sunflowers and The Yellow House. Paul Gauguin stayed with him during the autumn, but the collaboration ended in a quarrel in December 1888, when van Gogh cut off part of his ear. He voluntarily admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where in 1889 he painted The Starry Night, which is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In Arles he also painted portraits of the postman Joseph Roulin and his family, and the picture of his own bedroom, which he made in three versions.
He painted with thick paint in visible, rhythmic brushstrokes and used complementary colours to create tension. In about ten years he produced some 850 paintings and more than a thousand drawings. The more than 800 surviving letters, chiefly to Theo, are a unique source for how he thought about colour and art.
In May 1890 he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise outside Paris. There he shot himself at the end of July and died two days later, aged 37. The claim that he was shot by someone else has been put forward but is disputed and rejected by most scholars. Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, made the works and letters known. His influence on Fauvism and Expressionism was enormous. In his lifetime he sold very little. The only sale usually regarded as certain is The Red Vineyard, which is now in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Only a few decades after his death he had become a symbol of the misunderstood artist, and today his works are among the most visited and most valuable in the world.