Vincent van Gogh
1853-1890
Groot-Zundert, Netherlands
Van Gogh was Considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, and
a largely self-taught artist who remained poor and unknown throughout his life. Today, his paintings are some of the most expensive in the world. Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold for $82.5 million and “Irises” for $53.9 million.
He is known as much for his unstable psychological health, including famously cutting off his own ear, as he is for his huge body of post-Impressionist paintings (e.g. “Sunflowers” and “The Starry Night”), drawings, and sketches.
Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh moved from Paris to Arles in hopes of creating a community for artists to exist in mutual supportiveness and encouragement. He invited Paul Gauguin, an artist whom he had befriended in Paris, to come stay with him. They proved to be a disagreeable pair and quarrelled often, sometimes violently. The evening of December 23, 1888 during one of their arguments, Van Gogh had a seizure during which he threatened Gauguin with a razor, but then injured himself, severing part of his left ear. In a state of excitement, he then brought the dismembered lobe to the ‘Maison de Tolérance bordello’ where he presented it to a prostitute named Tiffany. When Gauguin returned the following morning, he discovered that the police had arrived at the house, and blood was splattered in every room. Van Gogh had severed an artery in his neck, and was in grave health after losing so much blood. He was removed to the hospital, and he confessed to having no recollection of what happened during this fit. Throughout his life, Van Gogh continued to suffer from similar fits, sometimes characterized by acute paranoia.
The Starry Night by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh
The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.
Starry Night Over the Rhône by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh
Starry Night, commonly known as Starry Night Over the Rhône, is one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of Arles at night. It was painted on the bank of the Rhône that was only a one or two-minute walk from the Yellow House on the Place Lamartine, which Van Gogh was renting at the time.
The Harvest (La Moisson) by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh
Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer – Arles, 1888 by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh
Can you see why these fishermen’s boats appear slightly unreal? Compared to the irregular surface of the sandy beach, they’ve been painted in an overly two-dimensional way. The boats are made up of areas of uniform colour within strong outlines. Furthermore, the boats don’t cast shadows on the beach. These stylistic elements were familiar to Van Gogh from his collection of Japanese prints.
Van Gogh would have preferred to make this painting on the beach, but he couldn’t, because the fishermen put out to sea very early every morning. He did draw the boats there, however, and later made this painting at home.
Almond Blossoms by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh
Almond Blossoms is a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees.
Large blossom branches like this against a blue sky were one of Van Gogh’s favourite subjects. Almond trees flower early in the spring making them a symbol of new life. Van Gogh borrowed the subject, the bold outlines and the positioning of the tree in the picture plane from Japanese printmaking.
The painting was a gift for his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo, who had just had a baby son, Vincent Willem. In the letter announcing the new arrival, Theo wrote: ‘As we told you, we’ll name him after you, and I’m making the wish that he may be as determined and as courageous as you.’ Unsurprisingly, it was this work that remained closest to the hearts of the Van Gogh family. Vincent Willem went on to found the Van Gogh Museum.
The Night Café by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh
The Night Café is an oil painting created by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh in September 1888 in Arles. Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature. The painting is owned by Yale University and is currently held at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
The Siesta (La Meridienne) by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh
The Siesta is an oil on canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh painted between December 1889 and January 1890 while he was interned in a mental asylum in the French town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. It is part of the permanent collection of the ‘Musée d’Orsay, in Paris’.
Café Terrace at Night by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh
Café Terrace at Night is an 1888 oil painting by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh. It is also known as The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, and, when first exhibited in 1891, was entitled Coffeehouse, in the evening (Café, le soir).
Van Gogh painted Café Terrace at Night in Arles, France, in mid-September 1888. The painting is not signed, but described and mentioned by the artist in three letters.[1]
Wheat Field Under Thunderclouds by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds is an 1890 oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. The painting measures. It depicts a relatively flat and featureless landscape with fields of green wheat, under a foreboding dark blue sky with a few heavy white clouds.
Wheat Field with Cypresses by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Cypresses gained ground in Van Gogh’s work by late June 1889 when he resolved to devote one of his first series in Saint-Rémy to the towering trees. Distinctive for their rich impasto, his exuberant on-the-spot studies include the Met’s close-up vertical view of cypresses (49.30) and this majestic horizontal composition, which he illustrated in reed-pen drawings sent to his brother on July. Van Gogh regarded the present work as one of his “best” summer landscapes and was prompted that September to make two studio renditions: one on the same scale (National Gallery, London) and the other a smaller replica, intended as a gift for his mother and sister (private collection).
Peach Trees in Blossom (Perzikbomen In Bloei) by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
“Perzikbomen In Bloei”, is a famous painting by Vincent Van Gogh, from the Flowering Orchards series which he executed in Arles. Flowering trees were special to Van Gogh; they represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees.
Houses at Auvers by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Houses at Auvers is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh. It was created towards the end of May or beginning of June 1890, shortly after he had moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town northwest of Paris, France.
Self-portrait with grey felt hat by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in the winter of 1887–88, when he had been in Paris for almost two years. It is clear from the work that he had studied the technique of the Pointillists and applied it in his own, original way. He placed the short stripes of paint in different directions. Where they follow the outline of his head, they form a kind of halo.
The painting is also one of Van Gogh’s boldest colour experiments in Paris. He placed complementary colours alongside one another using long brushstrokes: blue and orange in the background, and red and green in the beard and eyes. The colours intensify one another. The red pigment has faded, so the purple strokes are now blue, which means the contrast with the yellow is less powerful.
Sunflowers
Sunflowers is the title of two series of still life paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The first series, executed in Paris in 1887, depicts the flowers lying on the ground, while the second set, made a year later in Arles, shows a bouquet of sunflowers in a vase.
Van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers are among his most famous. He did them in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow ‘and nothing else’. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.
The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh, they communicated ‘gratitude’, he wrote. He hung the first two in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House. Gauguin was impressed by the sunflowers, which he thought were ‘completely Vincent’. Van Gogh had already painted a new version during his friend’s stay and Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, which Vincent was reluctant to give him. He later produced two loose copies, however, one of which is now in the Van Gogh Museum.
Irises by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Irises is one of several paintings of irises by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, and one of a series of paintings he made at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890.
Van Gogh started painting Irises within a month of entering the asylum, in May 1889, working from nature in the hospital garden. There is a lack of the high tension which is seen in his later works. He called painting “the lightning conductor for my illness” because he felt that he could keep himself from going insane by continuing to pain.
La Chambre à Arles by Dutch Artist Vincent van Gogh
Bedroom in Arles is the title given to each of three similar paintings by 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh’s own title for this composition was simply The Bedroom.
Van Gogh chose his bedroom in the “yellow house” as his subject, where he set up his studio, then lived from September 17, 1888 and which will be destroyed during the Allied bombardment of Arles from June 25, 1944. He makes this painting in october 1888, a period during which he awaited the arrival in Arles of Paul Gauguin with whom he wished to found a circle of artists.
While he was in Arles, Van Gogh made this painting of his bedroom in the Yellow House. He prepared the room himself with simple furniture and with his own work on the wall. The bright colours were meant to express absolute ‘repose’ or ‘sleep’. Research shows that the strongly contrasting colours we see in the work today are the result of discolouration over the years. The walls and doors, for instance, were originally purple rather than blue. The apparently odd angle of the rear wall, meanwhile, is not a mistake on Van Gogh’s part – the corner really was skewed. The rules of perspective seem not to have been accurately applied throughout the painting, but this was a deliberate choice. Vincent told Theo in a letter that he had deliberately ‘flattened’ the interior and left out the shadows so that his picture would resemble a Japanese print. Van Gogh was very pleased with the painting: ‘When I saw my canvases again after my illness, what seemed to me the best was the bedroom.’