Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch postimpressionist
painter whose work represents the archetype of expressionism,
the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting.
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The Potato-Eaters, 1885
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh |
Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert,
son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a
moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit.
By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery,
a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among
the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher
are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers;
of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato
Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam). Dark and
somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh's
intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as
he saw it among the miners in Belgium.
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*The Bridge in the Rain (after
Hiroshige),
1887 Van Gogh Museum,
Amsterdam (detail) |
In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his
brother Théo van Gogh, an art dealer, and became familiar with
the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the
work of the impressionists and by the work of such Japanese printmakers
as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current
techniques. Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found
in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges
Seurat.
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The Bedroom at Arles, 1887,
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France,
where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of
the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic
of the region. During this period, living at Arles, he began to
use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and
blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles (1888,
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry Night (1889, Museum
of Modern Art, New York City). For van Gogh all visible phenomena,
whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical
and spiritual vitality. In his enthusiasm he induced the painter
Paul Gauguin, whom he had met earlier in Paris, to join him.
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Dr. Paul Gachet, 1890
Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
After less than two months they began to have
violent disagreements, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh
wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor; the same night, in deep
remorse, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. For a time he was
in a hospital at Arles. He then spent a year in the nearby asylum
of Saint-Rémy, working between repeated spells of madness. Under
the care of a sympathetic doctor, whose portrait he painted (Dr.
Gachet, 1890, Musée du Louvre, Paris), van Gogh spent three
months at Auvers. Just after completing his ominous Crows in the
Wheatfields (1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), he shot himself
on July 27, 1890, and died two days later.
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*Wheatfield with Crows, 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam |
The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote
to his brother Théo (published 1911, translated 1958) constitute
a remarkably illuminating record of the life of an artist and
a thorough documentation of his unusually fertile output-about
750 paintings and 1600 drawings. The French painter Chaim Soutine,
and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
and Emil Nolde, owe more to van Gogh than to any other single
source. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing over
1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.
*Images from the Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van
Gogh Foundation)
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl
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