Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 - 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. He was a pioneer of Expressionism with enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art.

Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief period as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not begin his career as an artist until he was about 27; however during the last ten years of his life, he produced more than 2,000 pieces, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. He worked only with sombre colours until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. Van Gogh incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which he had fully developed by the time he spent at Arles, France. Most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years, amid the recurrent bouts of mental illness which led to his eventual suicide at the age of 37.

A central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards.


Work
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Van Gogh drew and painted with watercolors while he went to school, though very few of these works survive, and his authorship is challenged for many claimed to be from this period. When he committed himself to art as an adult in 1880, he started at the elementary level by copying the Cours de dessin, edited by Charles Bargue and published by Goupil & Cie. Within his first two years he began to seek commissions, and in spring 1882, his uncle, Cornelis Marinus (owner of a renowned gallery of contemporary art in Amsterdam) asked him to provide drawings of the Hague; Van Gogh's work did not prove up to his uncle's expectations. Despite this, Uncle Cor (or "C.M." as he was referred to by his nephews) offered a second commission, specifying the subject matter in detail, but he was once again disappointed with the result. Nevertheless, Van Gogh persevered with his work. He improved the lighting of his atelier (studio) by installing variable shutters, and experimented with a variety of drawing materials. For more than a year he worked hard on single figures - highly elaborated studies in "Black and White", which at the time gained him only criticism. Nowadays they are appreciated as his first masterpieces.

In spring 1883, he embarked on multi-figure compositions, based on the drawings. He had some of them photographed, but when his brother commented that they lacked liveliness and freshness, Vincent destroyed them and turned to oil painting. Already in autumn 1882, Theo had enabled him to do his first paintings, but the amount Theo could supply was soon spent. Then, in spring 1883, Vincent turned to renowned Hague School artists like Weissenbruch and Blommers, and received technical support from them, as well as from painters like De Bock and Van der Weele, both Hague School artists of the second generation.

When he moved to Nuenen, after the intermezzo in Drenthe, he started various large size paintings, but he destroyed most of them himself. The Potato Eaters and its companion pieces - The Old Tower on the Nuenen cemetery and The Cottage - are the only ones that have survived. After a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Vincent was aware that many faults of his paintings were due to a lack of technical experience. So he went to Antwerp, and later to Paris to improve his technical skill.

More or less acquainted with Impressionist and Neo-impressionist techniques and theories, Van Gogh went to Arles to develop these new possibilities. But within a short time, older ideas on art and work reappeared: ideas like doing series on related or contrasting subject matter, which would reflect the purpose of art. As his work progressed he painted a great many Self-portraits. Already in 1884 in Nuenen he had worked on a series that was to decorate the dining room of a friend in Eindhoven. Similarly in Arles, in spring 1888 he arranged his Flowering Orchards into triptychs, began a series of figures that found its end in The Roulin Family, and finally, when Gauguin had consented to work and live in Arles side-by-side with Vincent, he started to work on the The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Most of his later work is elaborating or revising its fundamental settings. In the spring of 1889 he painted another smaller group of orchards. In an April letter about them to Theo he said: I have 6 studies of spring, two of them large orchards. There is little time because these effects are so short-lived.

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