Who Is Vincent Van Gogh?

In 1880 at the age of 27, Van Gogh moved to Brussels began taking lessons on his own. He took some lessons from his cousin by marriage. He studied some books like Travaux des champs by Jean-Francois Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue. After completing his

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, Netherlands. He was very connected to nature which showed in his artwork. His paintings had plants, trees and his symbol, a sunflower. While famous today for his art, Vincent van Gogh faced many of his own personal issues during his life. Vincent van Gogh struggled with mental illness throughout his life, but put his struggles into his art to eventually become one of the greatest artists in history.

Van Gogh’s mental illness started to worsen. Gauguin left Arles after an incident. Van Gogh pursued him with a razor, but ended up cutting a portion of his own earlobe off. Van Gogh was sent to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. During his stay in the asylum, he painted the gardens. One of his most recognizable works, The Irises, was painted in Saint-Rémy. In this asylum, van Gogh painted one of his most influential pieces of all time, Starry Night.

Vincent Van Gogh used the 4 elements of art in his masterpiece “The Starry night” he used lines to create the background and foreground in the picture he used spiral lines to create the humongous Cypress tree in the painting. Van Gogh also used lines to give the stars more attention than what they were getting before. Van Gogh used shapes and forms in his painting, he used geometric forms to present the houses in the back as 3-D shapes. Van Gogh used space in his artwork by making it an illusion to the person looking at the photo. “...look at the cypress tree in the foreground.

It was on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Holland, that Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born to a preacher and an artist. His father, Theodorus Van Gogh, was described as an austere country minister who raised his sons in a religious atmosphere, while his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, imparted on Vincent her love for color and art. While Vincent Van Gogh became known later in time for his heartbreaking backstory and troubled mind, melancholia remained a continuous theme in his life story even prior to his birth. In fact, Van Gogh was born exactly one year after Theodorus and Anna’s first son, also named Vincent, was delivered stillborn. This tragic timing led Vincent Van Gogh to grow up with his name and birthdate already etched onto the headstone of his dead brother.

In the later part of the 19th Century, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the population of cities began to expand exponentially, bringing major changes to society. The ability to gain steady employment and even learn a trade, brought the rural population from the farms and fields into the congestion of crowded cities. The resources needed for these industries also became a growing operation for towns, which focused on gathering and mining the natural resource to fuel the machines of industry. This period also generated a common-sense opinion of what art should represent, and as result a school of artist emerged whose style is referred to as Realism. They created beautiful paintings, which were often a political or social statement clothed in the artistic representation of the working-class subjects and their conditions. They turned away form the romantic idealized view of art, to a truer, sometimes offensive, window into the common everyday realities.

which was painted in 1885. [Van] Gogh decided what he wanted to be in life and soon realized that

In 1880 at the age of twenty-seven Van Gogh moved to Brussels to become an artist. He studied with Willem Roelofs a Dutch artist. He then attended the Royal Academy of Art where he studied anatomy and perspective.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch, 1853 – 1890) born in Holland, had a unique method of expressing himself on canvas. He was a post impressionist painter whose paintings portrayed emotionally evocative style through the use of bold colors and later swirling brush strokes. Throughout his life van Gogh worked on his art while battling mental instability which lead to his death in 1890 as a result of a fatal, possibly self inflicted gun shot. His most famous and respected paintings were completed in the final two years of his life. Van Gogh began drawing at a young age and started painting during 1870. His work includes that of watercolor, drawings and sketches. Van Gogh painted landscapes and several self portraits. Though he started working with colors after perfecting drawing itself, one of the most recognizable features of Van Gogh’s work was his bold use of colors. After living in Arles with Gauguin for some time, Gauguin’s technique influenced Van Gogh resulting in paintings that were boldly colorful conveying his emotions. His life experiences and the environment he grew up in pushed him to produce such awe inspiring pieces with emotionally appealing meanings. His use of vibrant colors, instead of depicting reality, expressed his inner feelings. Van Gogh said: "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully."(Art Institute of Chicago 118) His work conveyed a feeling of movement. He worked

At least one piece of art has more than likely spoken to your soul or at least produced a feeling. This ability presented by powerful masterpieces is how artists are able to portray emotions to their audience. Portrayal of feelings through works of art has not always been the main objective for artists. Perceiving the passions of an artist was eventually recognized as a style of painting known as “postimpressionism” thanks to Vincent Van Gogh, a brilliant psychopath. Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century because of his ability to portray emotions through paintings, create a new understanding of creativity

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30 in 1853 in a village called Groot-Zundert in the province of North Brabant located in the southern Netherlands. He was raised in a Catholic dominant land by his father Theodorus van Gogh and his mother Anna Cornelia Carbentus. His parents had strong roots in the Dutch Reformed Church because Vincent’s father was a preacher there (Van Gogh). He was the first born child because the child his parents were supposed to have before him was a stillborn. His parents went on to have five more kids (McQuillan). Vincent van Gogh based his art off of the things that he wished he had in his life such hope and new beginnings, he was deprived of these qualities because of his struggles with despair and misfortune.

A man who suffered his entire life with mental illness and a lack of love and support, Vincent van Gogh had no easy life. Yet, his works of art not only paint the walls of museums across the world, but also continue to influence the lives and visions of artists 126 years after his untimely death. Vincent van Gogh died poor while never selling more than one painting. He died while never reaching his goal of an artistic community in Arles. Nevertheless, the legacy he leaves behind as one of the greatest artists in human history is nothing shy of Leonard da Vinci or Michelangelo. However, would it be appropriate to say Vincent van Gogh had a good life? This question sums up to whether the greatness of his work and the legacy he left after death overshadow the sufferings he endured while living.

In essence of this twenty-first (21st) Century, the life of Vincent Van Gogh; has become more of a legend with a substantial figure among painters and western art in the society today. Vincent Van Gogh is said to be a person with persevering characteristics due to all the failures he encountered in his career path from being a “minister like his father to dealing in arts like his uncle” (Blumer,2002) before becoming the successful painter, we all acknowledge in the world today. However, Vincent Van Gogh is practically known to be the subject discussed in midst of artists, historians, and psychologists worldwide based on his artworks, his mental health issues and cutting–off his left ear.

Van Gogh's early period includes all his work from 1879-1885. In this period he painted The Potato Eaters, which is commonly referred to as his first important picture. This is a period where van Gogh is trying to convey peasant life to the viewer, and he makes use of a very dark palette. He then studies at the academy in Antwerp where he is forced to draw from plaster casts and to adopt academic principles which will affect his later works.

The one close relationship Van Gogh had with his siblings was with his brother Theo who supported him not only emotionally but financially. (Letters to Theo from Van Gogh are big parts in understanding Van Gogh’s life and the troubles he faced. published in 1959.) Van Gogh was largely self-taught as an artist, although he received help from his cousin, Mauve. His first works were heavily painted, mud-colored and clumsy attempts to represent the life of the poor (e.g. Potato-Eaters, 1885, Amsterdam), influenced by one of his artistic heroes, Millet. He moved to Paris in 1886, living with his devoted brother, Theo, who as a dealer introduced him to artists like Gauguin, Pissarro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. In Paris, he discovered color as well as the divisionist ideas which helped to create the distinctive dashed brushstrokes of his later work (e.g. Pere Tanguy, 1887, Paris). He moved to Arles, in the south of France, in 1888, hoping to establish an artists' colony there, and was immediately struck by the hot reds and yellows of the Mediterranean, which he increasingly used symbolically to represent his own moods (e.g. Sunflowers, 1888, London, National Gallery). He was joined briefly by Gauguin in October 1888, and managed in some works to combine his own ideas with the latter's Synthetism (e.g. The Sower, 1888, Amsterdam), but the visit was not a success. A final argument led to the infamous episode in which Van Gogh mutilated