Vincent Van Gogh was born in the Brabant village of Zundert, Netherlands on March 30th, 1853. He was given his name after his brother who had been stillborn on that same day and had three sisters and two brothers all younger than him. Van Gogh lived a normal and simple life as a child and went to school with all his siblings. At age eleven he was transferred out of his village school to a boarding school in Zevenbergen where he was deeply unhappy and took up drawing to make himself feel better. At age 14 he quit school with the intentions of never returning and was given a job at 16 by his uncle as a trainee at the international art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague, Netherlands. Later on, he was transferred to the dealers London branch store where he visited famous museums such as The British Museum. Here he was able to admire paintings by peasant painters. After losing interest in his job the dealership let him go and he had a variety of other jobs until he was 24.
Entering his mid-twenties, Van Gogh had no real passion or purpose in life so he decided to take a placement exam that would allow him to return to school to study theology. While studying one of his other uncles and his brother Theo noticed his severe lack of discipline and talking him into once again turning down school. Vincent would frequently write letters to his brother Theo Van Gogh and sometimes would include little sketches in the letters and enclose a drawing of what he had seen at the time. After receiving a number of sketches and drawings Theo advised his brother to concentrate more on his drawings. Van Gogh was now convinced that he could also serve God as an artist and decided to move to Brussles in October of 1880 to begin his work on his drawing techniques and come in contact with other artists.
From 1883 to 1885 he frequently moved in and out of his childhood home working in a small studio in the back of his house before renting a larger space with in his home village. While working in his larger studio he would frequently sketch the passing farmers and weavers. He proposed that his brother should sell his drawings while in Paris working at the Goupil & Cie branch there. However, his paintings were of no interest to the French because they preferred art with a lot more color and at the time Vincent had only been working with darker tones and drew a lot of his drawings with charcoal. After his father’s death in 1885 he moved into his art studio and decided to enroll in the academy of art in Antwerp Belgium where he had access to better materials, drawing clubs with models, and easy access to churches, museums, and galleries that were filled with other art forms. He left the school after a short time because he felt the classes and the academy were too traditionally based for his artistic views. He arranged to move to Paris with his brother to take lessons in the studio of Fernand Cormon, an artist popular with foreign students. Van Gogh arrived at the end of February in 1886.
At this time Van Gogh’s brother was the manager of Goupil art dealers on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris and had introduced him to all of the colorful work of the famous artists like Claude Monet. While working at Cormon’s Vincent also got to know a new generation of artists including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. Each artist and painting he saw had a deep impression and influence on his own work and inspired him to experiment more freely. The dark tones in one of his older paintings The Potato Eaters quickly took a back seat to brighter colors like in his The Hill of Montmartre with Stone Quarry. Along with using brighter colors under the influence of modern art he also developed his own style of painting, with shorter brush strokes. He also changed the themes of his paintings no longer painting rural laborers but now painting cafes, boulevards, the countryside, floral still lives and portraits. He discovered more inspiration in Japanese woodcuts, which were popular for purchase in large numbers in Paris. The use of bold outlines, cropping and color contrasts showed in his work. Van Gogh chose to paint only what he could see in front of him, while living in The Yellow House from 1888 to 1889 he painted the orchards and crop gatherers he saw and would visit the coast to paint the boats at the edge of the water. Vincent had proposed to Theo that he should set up a ‘Studio of the South’ in Arles for a group of artists to work, as they worked Theo would sell their creations. With this idea in mind Vincent rented four rooms in the Yellow House, however, Paul Gauguin a French artist would be his first and last artist to move in. Gaugin arrived in late October of 1888 and worked with Van Gogh. Their collaboration resulted in many great paintings, however, they had very different views on art and frequently argued. Different from Van Gogh, Gauguin worked mainly from memory and his imagination causing heavy and thick tension. Vincent began to display signs of agitation and when Gauguin finally threatened to leave Vincent threatened him with a razor. Later that evening Van Gogh sliced off his own ear, wrapped it in newspaper and presented it to a prostitute in the red-light district. The morning after the incident he was admitted in to the Hospital. He remembered very little about what happened and was discharged in early January of 1889 looking to resume painting as normal.
In later months, his mental health fluctuated frequently and out of fear he voluntarily admitted himself to Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric hospital in May. Once he recovered enough he started to work again. On good days, he would paint the institution’s walled garden and later he was granted the option to work outside as well as given an extra room inside the clinic to use as a studio where he made a series of paintings including copies of prints after paintings by artists like Rembrandt and Millet. His mental health was still unstable and during a period of extreme confusion he ate some of his oil paint which got him restricted to drawing. Despite many episodes he was extremely productive completing around 150 paintings in a year. He was released from the mental hospital in May of 1890 and threw himself entirely into his paintings completing almost a piece a day, many people said his health seemed to be improving. Unfortunately, the countryside was not enough to cure Van Gogh. His illness and his fear of the future became too much to handle and on July 27th, 1890 Vincent walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest with a pistol. He limped back to his room at the Auberge Ravoux and his brother was present when he took his last breath on the 29th of July. Vincent Van Gogh was buried at Auvers on July 30th, 1890. He left behind over 850 painting and almost 1,300 works on paper.
Van Gogh was known for his think application of paint on canvas, called impasto. Impasto is a word for paste or mixture in Italian and is used to describe a painting technique where oil based paints are laid on so thickly that the texture of brush strokes or palette knife are obvious to the eye. Before painting in France, he drew in black and white usually landscapes and figure drawing working on perspective. When drawing he used pencil, black chalk, red chalk, blue chalk, reed pen, and charcoal. He would sometimes mix mediums while drawing and used a variety of paper types and materials. He captured light and images quicker when drawing than with painting and he would usually sketch out every image before painting anything. As well as drawing and using oil paints he also produced around 150 watercolor paintings. Van Gogh’s watercolor paintings can be pointed out usually for their bold and vibrant colors. Initially he would use watercolors to add shades to his drawings but then decided to make them their own entity. In 1882, he began experimenting with lithography which is a printmaking technique based on the idea that oil and water do not mix, in which ink is applied to a piece of paper from a prepared stone. With this technique, he created nine lithographs and one etching. When he moved to Paris in 1886 he was influenced by work of people called Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists. Impressionists were a part of the impressionism movement of the 19th century including Claude Monet one of Van Gogh’s influences. An art movement characterized with small think brush strokes, open composition, and accurate light depiction. It emphasized the presence of color within shadows and the result of color and light making an “impression” on the retina. Because of this new art form, he began using a lighter palette of reds, yellows, oranges, greens, and blues and used broken brush strokes of the Impressionists. He also attempted the pointillist technique of Neo-Impressionists which used tiny dots of various pure colors which blended in the viewer’s eye to create a whole image. Van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits between 1886 and 1889, reflecting his advancement in complementary color contrast and bolder composition. He used portrait painted as a method of introspection and developing his artistic skills. Although Vincent fought with Gauguin for most of their time working together he started to imitate Gauguin’s technique of painted from memory which caused his paintings to be more attractive instead of realistic. He used certain colors to capture mood rather than using colors realistically. His love for painting orchards was inspired by the light and vibrant colors of the Provencal spring or spring in Paris. Van Gogh created 14 different paintings of orchards. He also drew influence from Japanese prints which usually depicted orchards and blossoms.