Modern Age
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
Dutch Post-Impressionism painter.
Vincent van Gogh painted for barely a decade and sold almost nothing in his lifetime, yet he became one of the most beloved and influential artists who ever lived. A Dutch pastor's son, he failed as an art dealer, a teacher, and a lay preacher before turning to art in his late twenties. His early Dutch work is dark and earthbound — peasants, weavers, the somber 'Potato Eaters'. Moving to Paris in 1886, he met the Impressionists and discovered Japanese prints, and his palette exploded into color.
In 1888 he went south to Arles seeking stronger light, and there produced the work the world remembers: the sunflowers, the yellow house, the night café, the starry skies. He dreamed of a community of artists and invited Gauguin to join him; the collaboration ended in a breakdown in which van Gogh mutilated his own ear. He committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where, in bouts of ferocious productivity between attacks of illness, he painted 'The Starry Night' and the writhing cypresses and olive groves.
His letters to his brother Theo — hundreds of them, now fully published and verified — are among the greatest artistic documents ever written, lucid on exactly how and why he bent color and stroke to feeling. He shot himself at Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890 and died at thirty-seven. Within a generation his example had helped ignite Expressionism.
The words the record keeps using: intense, vital, expressive, yearning, sincere, turbulent, luminous.
At a glance
- Lived 1853–1890
- Origin Dutch
- Worked in Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Post-Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Impasto, Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Directional impasto
Works in the archive
- The Starry Night, 1889 (Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Painted from the window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy, with an imagined village added, this is the most famous night sky in art. A great churning current of stars and moon rolls over a quiet town while a black… - Sunflowers, 1889 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
One of the series of sunflower still lifes van Gogh painted in Arles to decorate the yellow house for Gauguin's arrival; this is the Van Gogh Museum's repetition of the composition. He treated the flowers as a symbol of… - The Bedroom, 1889 (Art Institute of Chicago)
Van Gogh's own small bedroom in the yellow house at Arles, painted as an image of rest and security; this is the second, autograph version (the Art Institute of Chicago's) of a composition he loved enough to repeat. He… - Self-Portrait, 1889 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
Painted at the Saint-Rémy asylum in September 1889, this is the most searching of van Gogh's some thirty-five self-portraits. He fixes the viewer with a steady, wary gaze from a field of swirling blue-green, the same… - Wheatfield with Crows, 1890 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
One of the double-square canvases van Gogh painted in his last weeks at Auvers-sur-Oise: a stormy sky over golden wheat, three diverging paths, and a flock of black crows. Long read — probably too simply — as a…
What was said
I've tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green.
The sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.
Van Gogh repeatedly wrote to Theo that he envied the clarity and flat, joyful color of the Japanese printmakers and wanted to work as they did, treating the bright landscape of the south as his own 'Japan'.
Lineage
Learned from Katsushika Hokusai, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Utagawa Hiroshige, Jean-François Millet
What would Vincent make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Vincent van Gogh", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Vincent · Keep a life moment the way Vincent would · Pictures made after Vincent