Vincent van Gogh

Early Life and False Starts

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, a small village in the southern Netherlands. The son of a pastor, he grew up in a devout Protestant household with five siblings. He was the second child named Vincent Willem — his elder brother by the same name had been stillborn exactly a year before.

Van Gogh spent his twenties searching for purpose. He worked as an art dealer in The Hague, London, and Paris, was dismissed, then tried to become a minister like his father. After failing his theology exams and a stint as a lay preacher among impoverished Belgian coal miners, he arrived at painting almost by accident, beginning serious artistic study only around 1880, at age 27.

His early Dutch works — dark, thickly painted scenes of peasants and weavers — culminated in The Potato Eaters (1885), a deliberately somber canvas he considered his first major painting. It showed little of what was to come.

Paris and the Transformation

In 1886 Van Gogh moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer who would support him financially and emotionally for the rest of his life. The city changed everything. He encountered the Impressionists — Monet, Pissarro, Seurat — and his palette exploded from earth tones to vivid yellows, blues, and greens. He also met Paul Gauguin, who would become a pivotal and ultimately destructive presence in his life.

By 1888 the noise of Paris wore him down and he fled south to Arles, in Provence, renting the famous Yellow House. There, in an astonishing burst of productivity, he produced over 200 paintings in 15 months — sunflowers, orchards in bloom, night skies, and portraits of local people. He envisioned Arles as an artists' colony and invited Gauguin to join him.

Crisis and the Final Years

The partnership with Gauguin ended in crisis. In December 1888, during an episode of severe mental distress — possibly linked to temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder, or both — Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear and delivered it to a woman at a local brothel. Gauguin fled and the two never met again.

Van Gogh voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1889, and continued painting throughout his stay. The Starry Night, among the most recognized paintings in the world, was made there. He produced around 150 canvases during his year at the asylum.

In May 1890 he moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise, under the informal care of Dr. Paul Gachet. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in the chest with a revolver in a wheat field; he died two days later, with Theo at his side. He was 37 years old. In a decade of serious painting he had produced over 2,100 works, including 860 oil paintings.

Legacy

In his own time Van Gogh was almost unknown outside a small circle. Theo died six months after his brother and it fell largely to Theo's wife, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, to organize and promote the estate. She worked tirelessly to place his paintings in exhibitions and his letters in print, and the world eventually caught up.

Today Van Gogh is considered one of the foundational figures of modern art. His influence flows into Expressionism, Fauvism, and beyond. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which opened in 1973, holds the world's largest collection of his work. His contemporaries — Pre-Raphaelite painters like William Holman Hunt — were working in an entirely different direction, underscoring how radical Van Gogh's vision truly was.

The letters he wrote to Theo — nearly 700 survive — are themselves considered literary monuments, offering an intimate record of a brilliant, tormented mind at work.