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Born: 1853
Died: 1890
Summary of Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh, the famous tormented artist, tried to portray his emotional and spiritual state in each of his paintings. Van Gogh is today one of the most popular painters of all time, despite selling only one painting during his lifetime. Van Gogh’s canvases, which feature thickly packed, apparent brushstrokes presented in a brilliant, rich palette, stress the artist’s own expression in paint. Each painting conveys the artist’s interpretation of each situation, as seen through his eyes, intellect, and emotions. Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, this profoundly unique, emotionally expressive style has influenced artists and movements.
Van Gogh’s commitment to communicating man’s and nature’s underlying spirituality culminated in a synthesis of style and substance that produced dramatic, creative, rhythmic, and emotive canvases that transmit far more than the subject’s basic look.
Despite causing him considerable distress throughout his life, Van Gogh’s mental instability served as the frantic basis for his emotive representations of his environment, imbuing each painting with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.
The romantic picture of the suffering artist became associated with Van Gogh’s unstable personal nature. Many artists’ lives in the twentieth century were mirrored by his self-destructive skill.
To portray subjective feelings, Van Gogh employed an impetuous, expressive application of paint and symbolic hues. Many following contemporary groups, from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism, adopted these approaches and practises.
Childhood
Vincent Van Gogh was born in the south of the Netherlands to a devout Dutch Reformed Church family as the second of six children. His father, Theodorus Van Gogh, was a pastor, while his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was a bookseller’s daughter. Van Gogh had erratic emotions as a youngster and had little early interest in art, despite excelling at languages while attending two boarding schools. He dropped out of school in 1868 and never returned.
Early Life
Van Gogh began his career as an apprentice at the headquarters of international art dealers Goupil & Cie in Paris in 1869, later working in the firm’s Hague division. As an art dealer, he was fairly successful, and he worked with the company for over a decade. Van Gogh began writing letters to his younger brother Theo in 1872. Vincent’s correspondence lasted till the end of his life. Theo became an art dealer the next year, while Vincent was transferred to Goupil & Cie’s London office. Vincent got sad about this period and turned to God for help.
Van Gogh was fired from Goupil’s after many moves between London and Paris, and he chose to seek a career in the priesthood. He gave up his things to the local coal workers while living as a destitute preacher in southern Belgium until the church fired him due to his excessively passionate dedication to his beliefs. “To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture.” Van Gogh wrote in 1880.
A year later, in 1881, Van Gogh was forced to return home with his parents, where he learned himself to paint. He developed feelings for his cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker. Despite her rejection, he persisted in his pursuit of her devotion, which finally led to the family’s disintegration. Van Gogh relocated to the Hague, hired a studio, and studied under Anton Mauve, a major member of the Hague School, with Theo’s help. Van Gogh was introduced to the work of French painter Jean-François Millet, who was known for painting peasants and ordinary labourers.
Mid Life
Van Gogh began painting the worn hands, heads, and other anatomical characteristics of labourers and the impoverished in 1884, after relocating to Nuenen, the Netherlands, with the goal of becoming a painter of peasant life like Millet. His work life was in order, but his personal life was in disarray. Van Gogh accused Theo of not putting forth enough effort to sell his paintings, to which Theo responded that Vincent’s gloomy palette was out of style in comparison to the bold and colourful style of the Impressionist artists, which was fashionable at the time. Their father died suddenly of a stroke on March 26, 1885, placing pressure on Van Gogh to have a great career.
Van Gogh studied in the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1885, before leaving the Netherlands for the last time. There he encountered the work of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, whose swirling shapes and free brushwork influenced the young artist’s approach significantly. The school’s strict academicism, on the other hand, did not appeal to Van Gogh, who departed the following year for Paris. He moved in with Theo in Montmartre, northern Paris’s artist’s area, and studied with painter Fernand Cormon, who exposed him to the Impressionists. Artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Georges Seurat, as well as Theo’s push to sell paintings.
Between 1886 and 1888, Van Gogh had a strong interest in Japanese prints, studying and collecting them with zeal, even staging an exhibition of them at a Parisian café. Van Gogh staged an exhibition with his contemporaries Emile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in late 1887, and he showed with the Neo-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac at the Salle de Repetition of the Theatre Libre d’Antoine in early 1888.
Late Life
Van Gogh’s most famous works were created in the last two years of his life. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived and worked together in Arles, France, during the fall and winter of 1888. Van Gogh finally rented four rooms at 2 Place Lamartine, which became known as the “Yellow House” because of its citron colour. The artists’ relocation to Provence began as a proposal for a new artist’s colony in Arles as an alternative to Paris, and it occurred at a key time in each of their careers. Gauguin and Van Gogh collaborated closely in the “Yellow House” developing a notion of colour that was not based on nature and was expressive of inner emotion.
Van Gogh deliberately committed himself to a psychiatric facility in Saint-Remy, near Arles, on May 8, 1889, reeling from his deteriorating mental health. His mental health remained steady throughout the weeks, and he was permitted to resume painting. This was one of his most prolific periods. Van Gogh completed approximately 100 pieces during his year in Saint-Remy, including Starry Night (1889). His major themes were the clinic and its garden, which he painted with the energetic brushstrokes and sumptuous colours that characterised his mature era.
Shortly after leaving the clinic, Van Gogh went north of Paris to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he was cared for by Dr. Gachet, a homoeopathic doctor and amateur artist. As part of his rehabilitation, the doctor urged Van Gogh to paint, which he gladly accepted. In the latter months of his life, he meticulously recorded his surroundings in Auvers, creating an average of one painting each day. Van Gogh’s melancholy worsened after Theo revealed his desire to start his own firm and warned that finances would be scarce for a spell. He walked into a neighbouring wheat field on July 27, 1890, and shot himself in the chest with a pistol.
Van Gogh made it back to his chamber, but his wounds were not adequately treated, and he died in bed two days later. During his dying hours, Theo raced to be at his brother’s side, reporting that his final words were, “The sadness will last forever.”
Throughout art history, there are several examples of Van Gogh’s widespread effect. Following Van Gogh’s work, the Fauves and German Expressionists embraced his subjective and spiritually inspired use of colour. Van Gogh’s style of sweeping, expressive brushstrokes was used by the Abstract Expressionists in the mid-twentieth century to reflect the artist’s psychological and emotional state. Van Gogh’s expressive palette and brushwork influenced even the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s, such as Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl.
Famous Art by Vincent van Gogh
The Potato Eaters
1885
Van Gogh’s first masterpiece is believed to be this early canvas. Van Gogh painted while living among the peasants and labourers in Nuenen, the Netherlands, and tried to portray the people and their life as accurately as possible. He mimicked the peasants’ dismal living circumstances by rendering the scene in a dull palette and used unattractive models to further repeat the impact physical labour had on these people by rendering the scene in a dull hue. His use of loose brushstrokes to represent the peasants’ features and hands as they gather around the single, tiny lamp, eating their poor dinner of potatoes, adds to the atmosphere. Despite the painting’s emotive nature, it was not deemed a success until after Van Gogh’s death.
Café Terrace At Night
1888
This was one of the earliest scenes Van Gogh painted in Arles, and it was also the first time he utilised a nocturnal background in a painting. Van Gogh created a brilliant surface that pulses with an inner light, nearly defying the darker sky, by using contrasting colours and tones. The composition’s lines all point to the work’s centre, leading the viewer’s attention down the pavement as though strolling through cobblestone streets. The café is still open today and is considered a “mecca” for van Gogh aficionados travelling to the south of France.
Fourteen Sunflowers in a Vase
1888
The Sunflower series by Van Gogh was created to adorn the area set aside for Gauguin in the “Yellow House,” his Arles studio and residence. The sunflowers’ texture was built up with rich brushstrokes, and Van Gogh used a wide spectrum of yellows to represent the blossoms, thanks to newly developed pigments that allowed for new hues and tonal subtleties. From the full bloom in bright yellow to the withering and dying blossoms depicted in sombre ochre, Van Gogh employed the cheerful colours to express the complete lifecycle of the flowers.
Starry Night
1889
Van Gogh’s masterpiece, Starry Night, is widely regarded as his peak work. Starry Night, unlike most of his other works, was painted from memory rather than in the landscape. His whirling, turbulent representation of the sky – a drastic change from his previous, more realistic settings – reflects his concentration on internal, emotional life. The shapes are dispersed over the surface of the canvas in a perfect sequence to produce balance and tension amidst the whirling torsion of the cypress trees and the night sky, according to Van Gogh’s rigorous principle of structure and composition.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
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- Vincent Van Gogh, the famous tormented artist, tried to portray his emotional and spiritual state in each of his paintings.
- Van Gogh is today one of the most popular painters of all time, despite selling only one painting during his lifetime.
- Van Gogh’s canvases, which feature thickly packed, apparent brushstrokes presented in a brilliant, rich palette, stress the artist’s own expression in paint.
- Each painting conveys the artist’s interpretation of each situation, as seen through his eyes, intellect, and emotions.
- Throughout the twentieth century and into the present, this profoundly unique, emotionally expressive style has influenced artists and movements.
- Van Gogh’s commitment to communicating man’s and nature’s underlying spirituality culminated in a synthesis of style and substance that produced dramatic, creative, rhythmic, and emotive canvases that transmit far more than the subject’s basic look.
- Despite causing him considerable distress throughout his life, Van Gogh’s mental instability served as the frantic basis for his emotive representations of his environment, imbuing each painting with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance.
- The romantic picture of the suffering artist became associated with Van Gogh’s unstable personal nature.
- Many artists’ lives in the twentieth century were mirrored by his self-destructive skill.
- To portray subjective feelings, Van Gogh employed an impetuous, expressive application of paint and symbolic hues.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
