Vincent van Gogh

Vincent William van Gogh was born in 1853 at Groot Zundert, a little village in the Dutch province of Brabant, not far from the border between Holland and Belgium. Deeply religious, he studied for the priesthood but never passed the entrance exam for theology school.

The van Gogh family had, for centuries, given men of note to Holland especially as clergymen and in commerce; in the nineteenth century several members of the family were art dealer.

At 16 he became an assistant (1869-76) with an international firm of art dealers in their shops in The Hague, London and Paris.

In May 1876, he becomes a teacher in a school at Ramsgate. In April 1881, he set off for Brussels to study art, where his family encouraged him to take painting lessons.

He settled in The Hague where he lived with his model Christien, a prostitute. She appears in the drawing Sorrow (1882) and Sien Posing (1883).

Van Gogh began studying painting with Anton Mauve in January 1882. Van Gogh’s burst of creativity between 1885 and 1890 was his most productive interval. Especially after moving to Paris in 1886, van Gogh produced one classic painting after another at a manic pace fueled by both absinthe and his growing mental instability – producing more than 200 painting in the two years after his move.

Van Gogh has been acknowledged as a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism and has had an enormous influence on 20th century art.

In 1890 he went to live at Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, under the supervision of a physician, Dr Paul Gachet, himself an amateur painter and engraver, whom van Gogh painted.

On July 27, 1890, van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding Cornfields with Flight of Birds, and died two days later.
Vincent van Gogh