Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers; of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh's intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.
In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his brother Théo van Gogh (1857-91), an art dealer, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the work of the impressionists (see IMPRESSIONISM,) and by the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques. Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat. Typical of van Gogh's Parisian period are Père Tanguy (1887, private collection, Paris), the first of his paintings parting from the Dutch influence, and Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887, Metropolitan Museum, New York City).
In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, while living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Sunflowers (1888, one version in National Gallery, London), L'Arlésienne (1888, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil), Vincent's Bedroom in Arles (1888, Van Gogh Museum), The Night Café (1888, Yale University), and The Public Gardens in Arles (1888, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). For van Gogh all visible phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and spiritual vitality. In his enthusiasm he induced the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had met earlier in Paris, to join him. After less than two months they began to have violent disagreements over their art views, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor; that same night, in deep remorse, van Gogh severed part of his own ear. This episode marked the beginning of a periodic insanity that led to his death two years later. For a time he was in a hospital at Arles. He then spent a year in the nearby asylum of Saint-Rémy, working between repeated spells of madness. Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) was painted during his confinement at Saint-Rémy. Van Gogh's last three months of life were spent in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, where Pissarro also lived. There he painted approximately 70 paintings, including Dr. Gachet (1890, private collection, Tokyo), a portrait of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet (1829-1909), a sympathetic doctor who watched over van Gogh. (Dr. Gachet was an amateur painter and engraver under the pseudonym Van Ryssel and an art collector and patron of the impressionists.)
Just after completing his ominous Crows in the Wheatfields (1890, Van Gogh Museum), van Gogh shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died on July 29 of that year.
The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother Théo (pub. 1911, trans. 1958) constitute a remarkably illuminating record of the life of the artist, his conflicts and aspirations in art and as a human being, and also a record of the exemplary friendship between the two brothers which united them in art, life, and death (Théo died six months after Vincent). The French painter Chaïm Soutine, and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde owe more to van Gogh than to any other single source. Van Gogh, in fact, represents the archetype of EXPRESSIONISM, (q.v.), the idea of emotional spontaneity in painting.
In 1973 the Van Gogh Museum, containing more than 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam. Following a complete renovation and the completion of a new exhibition wing, it reopened in June 1999. The original building was designed by the Dutch architect Gerrit T. Rietveld and the new wing by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa (1934- ).
See also POSTIMPRESSIONISM,.