Van Gogh, Vincent Willem

Van Gogh, Vincent Willem (1853-1890), Dutch painter, who exemplified the idea of the artist as tortured genius. Van Gogh was born in Zundert, in the Netherlands, on March 30, 1853, the son of the Protestant minister Theodorus van Gogh. Most of Vincent’s life was orientated towards a career in the Church rather than in painting; he became an artist full-time only in 1880-1881, when he was 27. Several of van Gogh’s uncles were art dealers, and, after leaving school in 1869, he joined the firm of Goupil & Co. in The Hague, where his uncle Vincent worked. In the early 1870s, he was transferred to the London and Paris branches of the company. In 1876, however, he was dismissed, probably because his growing religious fervour showed that he was not suited to a life in the commercial art trade.

Van Gogh then went to England and took a job as a schoolmaster, first in Ramsgate, in Kent, and then in Isleworth, near London. He taught Sunday school and gave the occasional sermon but was keen to become a minister full-time and so returned to the Netherlands to begin studying for the entrance exam to university, where he was to take up theology. However, this also left him dissatisfied, and, hoping to find a practical application for his religious beliefs, he became an evangelist in the Borinage, a poor mining district in Belgium. Even here, van Gogh failed, because the Evangelization Committee was wary of his increasing fanaticism and so did not renew his appointment.

About 1881, when he was still living in poverty in the Borinage, van Gogh’s interests moved towards art rather than the Church, more so after he visited the painter Jules Breton, who depicted peasants and whom, with Jean-François Millet, van Gogh took as a model. In 1881, he returned to live with his parents, now residing in Etten, in Brabant, and began to concentrate on his career as a professional artist. He was mostly self-taught, using prints, especially those of Millet, to copy from. His early work developed very slowly, however, showing little of the originality and skilful technique so evident in his later, famous works. From this time, van Gogh was supported financially by his brother Theo, who also worked for Goupil’s and with whom van Gogh maintained a close correspondence, in which he described in detail his daily life and the ideas for his works.

Conflicts with his father led van Gogh to abandon Etten for The Hague in late 1881. The Hague was the main centre of Dutch painting at this time, and here Vincent received some lessons in painting from his relative, Anton Mauve. Van Gogh concentrated on producing figure drawings, particularly of the woman with whom he lived, Sien Hoornik (who was a laundress and prostitute), and her children. One of the most celebrated drawings of this period is the seated nude study Sorrow (1882, Rijksmuseum van Gogh, Amsterdam), for which Sien was the model.

After his relationship with Sien Hoornik broke down, van Gogh hoped to find new inspiration alone in Drenthe, in the northern Netherlands, where he moved in 1883. The bleak and depressing landscape led him to produce few drawings and paintings, however, and he concentrated on writing to Theo. In December 1883, he returned once more to his parents’s home, this time in Nuenen, near Eindhoven, where he remained until November 1885. Here, he began producing works that he considered worthy of exhibition or sale. His most important painting of this period is The Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum van Gogh, Amsterdam), showing an interior with peasants eating a frugal meal and revealing his sympathy for the working people. In its dark colours and realist style, this painting is typical of van Gogh’s early work. Another important work of this time is the Open Bible, Extinguished Candle and Novel (Rijksmuseum van Gogh, Amsterdam); the open bible represents van Gogh’s father, who died in 1885, and the novel can be identified as Joie de Vivre by Émile Zola, whom van Gogh admired.

After a brief stay in Antwerp in 1885 and 1886, van Gogh decided to leave the Netherlands and settle in Paris, where he lived with Theo, who was trying to sell avant-garde paintings by such Impressionist artists as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro. In this way, van Gogh became familiar with the colourful style of the new movement, and he began to abandon the dark palette of his earlier works for a much lighter one. He was particularly influenced by the Pointillist works of Georges Seurat, which, as experiments in colour theory, used thousands of tiny dots of different hues to model form. This influence can be seen in van Gogh’s portrait of the painter dealer Julien-François Tanguy (1887-1888, Musée Rodin, Paris) and in his own series of self-portraits of this time, in which forms are modelled by using short strokes of bright colours. Another important inspiration for van Gogh were Japanese prints, with their clear lines and strong, flat colours. His interest in an almost abstract style of painting brought him into contact with such avant-garde painters as Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, with whom he remained closely associated.

To realize his long-held ideal of becoming a painter of the working people, van Gogh moved in 1888 to Arles, in Provence, where some of his most famous works, rendered in intensely bright colours and an expressionistic style, were painted. These include portraits of local people, such as the Postman Roulin (1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and his wife, and the paintings of sunflowers, which were originally intended to decorate the Yellow House that he had rented. He also wanted to form a community of artists and, in late 1888, persuaded Gauguin to leave Brittany and join him in Arles. However, the artists’ temperaments were incompatible; their collaboration ended in argument and with van Gogh cutting off part of his ear, the first sign of his serious mental instability. Gauguin left Arles, but he and Van Gogh remained in contact.

Van Gogh’s mental health deteriorated from 1888 onwards, and in May 1889 he admitted himself to an asylum at Saint-Rémy, near Arles. Between periods of illness, he produced a huge number of paintings and drawings expressing his torment in writhing, expressionistic forms. These include the famous Irises, sold at Sotheby’s, New York, in 1987 for a record price of $49 million, and Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York). These works had a particular influence on the work of the later German Expressionists and on Edvard Munch. In the last two and a half months of his life, van Gogh lived in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, where he was looked after by Dr Paul Gachet, a homoeopath with an interest in art and of whom van Gogh made two famous portraits. He also depicted his surroundings, as he had done throughout his life, as shown in paintings of the village church and local landscape of wheatfields. The brooding atmosphere of the Crows in a Wheatfield (1890, Rijksmuseum van Gogh, Amsterdam) is often considered to be the best reflection of the artist’s disturbed state of mind. After another attack of depression, van Gogh shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later. His brother Theo also succumbed to mental illness after Vincent’s death and died only six months later.