Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert on March 30th, 1853 in Holland ( The Netherlands) and died in 1890. Van Gogh was raised by a religious family with his father being a minister/pastor. Vincent was a highly strung person and lacked self-confidence.  Between 1860 and 1880 Van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year Van Gogh traveled to Antwerp and discovered Japanese prints and purchased many of them. In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists.  Van Gogh's paintings contained a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature. In May of 1890 Van Gogh shot himself ''for the good of all''. 

Van Gogh Gallery ,2013. [online] Available at <http://www.vangoghgallery.com/misc/bio.html>

[Accessed 28th April 2013]