🇳🇱 Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in the small Dutch village of Zundert, the son of a Protestant minister and a bookbinder's daughter with a love of drawing. He was a difficult child — intense, moody, prone to obsession — and his early adult life was a series of failed attempts at finding purpose. He worked as an art dealer in The Hague, London, and Paris, then as a teacher in England, then as an evangelical preacher among Belgian coal miners. He gave away his possessions to the destitute. He nearly starved. He was twenty-seven before he decided, finally and irrevocably, that he was going to be a painter. He had ten years left to live, and he used every hour of them.

The early paintings — made in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1885 — were dark and labored, earthy studies of peasant life. The Potato Eaters, his first major canvas, depicts a family of rough-handed Dutch farmers sharing a meager meal by lamplight. It is not a beautiful picture. It was not meant to be. Van Gogh wanted to paint the honest weight of physical labor, the dignity of lives lived close to the soil. What he hadn't yet found was color. That discovery came in Paris, where he arrived in 1886 and immersed himself in the work of the Impressionists — Monet, Pissarro, Seurat — whose broken brushwork and chromatic intensity transformed his palette. Within two years, the dark earth tones of Nuenen had given way to lemon yellows, cobalt blues, and the vibrant oranges that would define his mature style.

Arles, in the south of France, was where the genius fully ignited. Van Gogh arrived in February 1888, intending to establish an artists' colony in the brilliant Mediterranean light. In the fourteen months he spent there — before his famous breakdown, before the self-mutilation of his ear, before the hospitalization at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole — he produced an almost incomprehensible volume of work: The Bedroom, The Night Café, Sunflowers, Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin, and The Sower. He worked with a ferocity that alarmed even himself, sometimes completing a canvas a day, driven by a terror that the visions in his mind would escape him if he didn't chase them onto the canvas immediately. The swirling, dynamic brushwork that characterizes these paintings — thick impasto strokes that seem to pulse with their own energy — was not a stylistic decision so much as a necessity: it was how quickly he had to move to capture what he saw.

The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 from the window of his room at the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, is the image that has become synonymous with his name. The village below sleeps while the sky above it writhes with spiral galaxies and a moon so bright it seems to electrify the air. Van Gogh described himself as dissatisfied with the painting. He preferred his other work. The history of art has disagreed emphatically. The Starry Night now hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is among the most visited paintings on earth — a work made by a man in the grip of mental illness who saw the night sky as an overwhelming, swirling, living thing, and painted it exactly as he experienced it.

His mental health deteriorated through 1889 and into 1890. He suffered from episodes that may have been epilepsy, acute psychosis, or a combination of conditions still debated by medical historians. He checked himself into the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890, under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. He continued to paint — field after field under churning skies, portraits of Gachet, the wheat fields in all seasons. On July 27, 1890, he walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest. He survived for thirty-six hours, dying on July 29. He was thirty-seven years old. During his lifetime, he sold exactly one painting: The Red Vineyard, purchased by the Belgian artist Anna Boch for 400 francs in 1890. Today, his Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold at Christie's in 1990 for $82.5 million, at that time the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction.

Van Gogh's legacy is the rarest kind: the work that the world dismissed in life became the work the world could not live without in death. He completed over 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings in a decade. He wrote more than 800 letters to his brother Theo — a correspondence that is itself a masterpiece of art criticism and emotional autobiography. He was the first artist to prove, through the sheer evidence of his canvases, that the visible world could be remade entirely through the force of feeling. That premise is the foundation on which Expressionism, Fauvism, and abstract painting were all eventually built.