Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 into a pastor's family in Zundert, in the south of the Netherlands. He worked for the art dealers Goupil & Cie and then as a teacher and lay preacher before deciding, around 1880 and at the age of twenty-seven, to become an artist. Largely self-taught, he worked out his ideas in hundreds of letters to his brother Theo, which remain the essential source for his life and art. In Nuenen he painted peasants and their labor in dark, earthy tones, as in The Potato Peeler. After moving to Paris in 1886 he encountered Impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints, and his palette brightened rapidly; Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat dates from this period. In 1888 he settled in Arles in the south of France, where he painted with intense color and thick, rhythmic brushwork; L'Arlésienne and Shoes belong to these years. His shared stay with Paul Gauguin ended in crisis that December, and after repeated breakdowns he entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889, where he painted Wheat Field with Cypresses. Irises was painted shortly before he left. Van Gogh died of a gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, at the age of thirty-seven. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime, yet in a single decade he produced more than two thousand paintings and drawings. His use of color and brushwork to convey feeling directly shaped Fauvism and Expressionism and made him one of the best-known painters of the modern era.