How a pastor’s son who decided at 27 to become a painter moved from the dark fields of Holland to the colours of Paris and the sun and stars of southern France, leaving over 2,000 works in ten years
Vincent van Gogh · Public domain · Source
Living at his parents’ house in Nuenen, Van Gogh painted a peasant family eating potatoes by lamplight — his first major work, in dark colours.
Joining his brother Theo in Paris, Van Gogh met Impressionism and Japanese prints, and his dark painting turned to bright colour and short brushstrokes.
In Arles in southern France Van Gogh rented the Yellow House, painted sunflowers and the café at night and welcomed Gauguin — but two months later, after a violent quarrel, he injured his own ear.
Having entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy of his own accord, Van Gogh painted the dawn sky outside his window as a swirl of stars.
Having painted more than seventy works in his last seventy days at Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, Van Gogh died in July 1890, aged 37 — he had sold only a handful of paintings in his lifetime.
Dutch painter who in little more than ten years made over 2,000 works, some 860 of them oil paintings, whose vivid colour and brushwork shaped modern art
Vincent’s younger brother, an art dealer in Paris who supported him with money and letters all his life; he died six months after Vincent
French painter who worked with Van Gogh in Arles for two months in 1888 and later went to Tahiti to paint its people