Vincent van Gogh came to art late and by a winding road. Born in the Netherlands in 1853, he worked as an art dealer, a schoolteacher, and a missionary to Belgian coal miners before deciding, at the age of twenty-seven, to become a painter. His early works — dark, earthy scenes of peasant life like The Potato Eaters — gave little hint of the chromatic explosion to come. Everything changed when he moved to Paris in 1886 and encountered the vivid palette of the Impressionists and the bold patterns of Japanese woodblock prints. Within two years his style had transformed utterly, and he headed south to Arles in Provence, intoxicated by the fierce Mediterranean light.
It was in the south of France that Van Gogh produced the paintings that would make him immortal. Working at a furious pace — sometimes completing a canvas a day — he painted blazing Sunflowers, swirling cypress trees, and the luminous cafes and wheat fields of Provence with thick, rhythmic brushstrokes that seemed to pulse with raw emotion. He dreamed of establishing an artists’ colony and invited Paul Gauguin to join him, but their volatile cohabitation ended in a famous breakdown during which Van Gogh severed part of his own ear. Subsequent episodes of mental illness led to his voluntary admission to the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he painted The Starry Night — a night sky churning with cosmic energy above a sleeping village — one of the most recognized images in all of art.
Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field near Auvers-sur-Oise in July 1890, at the age of thirty-seven, having sold only a single painting during his lifetime. Yet within decades of his death, his reputation soared. His brother Theo’s widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, tirelessly promoted his work and published his extraordinary letters, revealing a deeply thoughtful and articulate mind behind the tormented legend. Today Van Gogh is among the most beloved artists in history, his paintings selling for staggering sums, his story a powerful testament to the gap that can exist between an artist’s suffering and the beauty they leave behind.