VAN GOGH, Vincent (Groot Zundert, 1853 – Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890)
Born in the Netherlandish village of Groot Zundert in 1853, Vincent Willem van Gogh was the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor. Between 1869 and 1876 Vincent lived between The Hague, Paris and London working for the art dealers Goupil & Cie. and anticipating the choice that his younger brother, Theo, would make a few years later. Vincent eventually left the firm in late 1876 and undertook the career as a clergyman after a failed attempt to be admitted to the Amsterdam School of Theology. At first he was appointed to travel as preacher throughout the mining districts of Belgium. Soon, the experience of the miners’ miserable existence convinced Vincent that he wanted to become an artist, inspired by the desire to depict their social hardship. Van Gogh’s autodidact training hence began around 1880 with the initial support of the painter Anton Mauve who was married to his cousin Ariëtte. Aspiring to become a peasant painter, Vincent eagerly studied Millet and committed to the miserable living conditions of the lower segments of society. Between 1882 and 1885 the artist refined his technique by constantly drawing and sketching. His first compositions are characterised by impoverished settings, dark tones and sad faces as we can observe in his 1885 first celebrated masterpiece: The Potato Eaters. The following year, enthusiastic about his progressing artistic skills, Vincent unexpectedly moved to Paris where his brother Theo was starting a career as an art dealer with Boussod, Valadon & Cie. His sojourn in Paris lasted nearly two years in which he met, within the Impressionists and post-Impressionist milieu, Pissarro, Seurat, Bernard, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec who deeply influenced his chromatic choices. Van Gogh also started to collect Japanese woodcuts which he had admired during his earlier stay in Antwerp and which significantly influenced the way of constructing the space in his own compositions. The turning point for his full artistic awakening started with his decision to move South, spurred by the desire to establish an artistic community outside the networks of the city. In February 1888 Vincent arrived in Arles where he executed a number of his most celebrated masterpieces such as the series of Orchards and Sunflowers. Vincent’s permanence in Arles was in fact one of the most productive for he incessantly painted. Among the works stand the series of the harvests and his best group of portraits such as the Zouave and of the Postman Joseph Roulin. In October 1888 Gauguin accepted his invitation and joined him in Arles but their cohabitation only lasted two months at the end of which Vincent first attacked Gauguin and subsequently amputated his own left ear. Those last two years are characterised by an increasing depression and ill health but also by the execution of compositions such as the Bedroom, the Yellow House and the Starry Night. Eventually, Vincent committed suicide on July 29 1890 in the Asylum at Auvers-sur-Oise, after producing nearly 900 paintings and a lavish corpus of drawings. Vincent van Gogh’s detailed biography stems from the intense correspondence that the artist kept with his brother Theo as well as with his friends and family.
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