Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh

1853-1890

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

Vincent produced his self-portraits because he wanted to practise painting people. The majority of them – over 25 – were done while he was in Paris (1886–88). He was short of money in that period and struggled to find models. So the artist chose the simplest solution and painted himself. To save money, he sometimes painted self-portraits on the back of other paintings. By doing that, he avoided the costs not only of a model but also of expensive canvas. You can see five such self-portraits in the Van Gogh Museum's online collection. Vincent often presented himself as restrained and serious in his self-portraits, with a look of concentration on his face.. All the same, something of Vincent’s personality can be found in each self-portrait. He described the last one he did in Paris as ‘quite unkempt and sad’. That’s how he felt at the time: mentally and physically exhausted

His life

what happened?

When he grew up, he didnt know what he wanted to be. So he tried different jobs like a salesman, a preaches, even working at a bookstore but none of them worked out. And then, he decided to become a painter. By the way in his life, he was struggling so much that he even chased his friend with a razor and ended up cutting his own ear off instead. The brother sent him to a hospital to get better.

Van Gogh was a serious and thoughtful child. He was taught at home by his mother and a governess, and in 1860, was sent to the village school. In 1864, he was placed in a boarding school at Zevenbergen

His paintings

His paintings were represented with sadness and madness that he felt inside of him and the beauty and inspiration of what he found around him. The paintings were very dramatic but at the same time beautiful and emotional. It was uniqe too and a new way of painting. After that Vincent Van gogh became on of the most original and best painter in the world. The most famous paintings made by him were "The golden sunflowers" and " The Starry Night".

Van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers are among his most famous. He did them in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow ‘and nothing else’. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh: they communicated ‘gratitude’, he wrote. He hung the first two in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House. Gauguin was impressed by the sunflowers, which he thought were ‘completely Vincent’. Van Gogh had already painted a new version during his friend’s stay and Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, which Vincent was reluctant to give him. He later produced two loose copies, however, one of which is now in the Van Gogh Museum.

The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, painted in June 1889. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art. The Starry Night is the only nocturne in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early June, Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". Researchers have determined that Venus (sometimes referred to as the "morning star") was indeed visible at dawn in Provence in the spring of 1889, and was at that time nearly as bright as possible. So the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of the cypress tree, is Venus. The painting was investigated by scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pigment analysis has shown that the sky was painted with ultramarine and cobalt blue, and for the stars and the moon, Van Gogh employed the rare pigment indian yellow together with zinc yellow.

Curiosities

Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions. He worried about his mental stability, and often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor when, in a rage, he severed his left ear. Van Gogh spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression persisted, and on 29 July 1890 van Gogh died from his injuries after shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful, but showed signs of mental instability. As a young man, he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a missionary in southern Belgium. Later he drifted into ill-health and solitude. He was keenly aware of modernist trends in art and, while back with his parents, took up painting in 1881. His younger brother, Theo, supported him financially, and the two of them maintained a long correspondence

Van Gogh's work began to attract critical artistic attention in the last year of his life. After his death, his art and life story captured public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius, due in large part to the efforts of his widowed sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. His bold use of colour, expressive line and thick application of paint inspired avant-garde artistic groups like the Fauves and German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Van Gogh's work gained widespread critical and commercial success in the following decades, and he has become a lasting icon of the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Today, van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings ever sold. His legacy is celebrated by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings

My opinion

I think he is one of the best and most famous painter I've ever seen. He was a very talented men, even if he struggled in his life and killed himself with a revolver. But still, in my opinion, he will remain the most successful men in the world

his signature

The French artist Guillaume Bruère (1976) frequently works in situ to make drawings of works of art that he admires. In September 2019, he drew a series of nine sheets at the Van Gogh Museum after Vincent’s Self-Portrait with Felt Hat.