Vincent van Gogh
Dutch·1853–1890
Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a small town in the southern Netherlands, the son of a Protestant minister. He tried several careers before painting: art dealing in The Hague, London, and Paris, then a stint as a lay preacher among coal miners in the Belgian Borinage, where he lived in near poverty and was eventually dismissed. He did not commit to art until 1881, at age 27, when most painters of his generation already had a decade of training behind them. His younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, began sending him a monthly allowance around this time, a lifeline that continued for the rest of Vincent's career and let him paint without needing to sell for income.
His first serious works, made in the Netherlands, used dark earth tones and heavy shadow, closer to Dutch peasant realism than the bright canvases he would later be known for. The Potato Eaters (1885), painted in Nuenen, shows farmers eating by lamplight, their faces roughened by field work. A brief stretch in Antwerp introduced him to color theory and Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and when he moved to Paris in 1886 to live with Theo, he encountered Impressionism firsthand for the first time. Both discoveries reshaped his palette, and within two years he had traded his muddy browns for the bright, broken color that defines Post-Impressionism.
Van Gogh moved south to Arles in February 1888, chasing the light he associated with Japanese prints, and the move triggered his most productive stretch. He painted the cafes and wheat fields around him at a furious pace, sometimes finishing a canvas a day. Café Terrace at Night and the Sunflowers series both date from this period, along with Bedroom in Arles, a deceptively simple painting of his own room that he made three versions of. He hoped Arles would become a shared studio for other painters and invited Paul Gauguin to join him that autumn.
The Gauguin visit ended badly. After a heated argument in December 1888, Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear, and the following months brought repeated hospitalizations. He voluntarily entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in May 1889, where, despite ongoing breakdowns, he kept working. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear documents the aftermath directly, while The Starry Night, painted from the asylum's window, turned a view of the night sky into swirling, almost physical motion.
In May 1890, Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, closer to Theo and under the care of a doctor named Paul Gachet. He worked at an extraordinary rate, nearly a painting a day, including the turbulent Wheatfield with Crows. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in a wheat field and died two days later at age 37. He had sold almost nothing while alive, and Theo, his closest supporter, died just six months after him. Recognition came slowly, driven largely by Theo's widow, Johanna, who published his letters and pushed his paintings into public view. Today the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds the largest collection of his work, and major paintings hang at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d'Orsay, and the National Gallery in London.
