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Essay: Vincent Van Gogh’s Iconic Masterpieces: The Starry Night & Beyond

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  • Published: 1 April 2019*
  • Last Modified: 23 July 2024
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  • Words: 1,096 (approx)
  • Number of pages: 5 (approx)

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The Starry Night is an oil on canvas by the Dutch post-impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh, also commonly known as Van Gogh.  In June 1889. Van Gogh painted The Starry Night. The genre of this particular painting is landscape.  The painting The Starry Night is located at  The Museum of  Modern  Art in New York.   

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 in a village in the southern Netherlands. Vincent’s sister described him as a serious child.  Van Gogh spent his young adult life working for art dealers.  He also took an interest in his father's work and became a missionary worker in an impoverished mining region in Belgium in 1879.  A year later, when Vincent turned twenty-seven years old, he took the suggestion of his brother Theo and decided to become a painter.  He went to different art schools to learn everything he could about drawing and painting.  Drawing and painting were not easy for Vincent, but he always tried his best at whatever he did.  After several years of study, he completed his first major work, The  Potato  Eaters (1885).  In the beginning, Van  Gogh limited his color pallet to dark colors.  When he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris his style changed, incorporating brighter colors and developing a painterly style that was uniquely recognizable.  Instead, of painting realistic paintings with dark muddy colors he started using bright colors with bold, thick brushstrokes.  Van Gogh worked hard and produced more than two-thousand paintings, drawings, and sketches in the last ten years of his life.  His best-known works were created in the last two years of his life.  Vincent Van Gogh died on July 29, 1890, having produced some of the best-known and most expensive works of art in the world today.  His painting The  Starry  Night (1869)  has become one of the most celebrated art masterpieces of all time.  Van Gogh pioneered the art movement that came to be known as Expressionism.  When he died in 1890, he had only sold one painting during his lifetime.  He had no idea that he would become so famous, but after his death, people began to appreciate his work.  One of his paintings (Portrait of Dr. Gachet)  sold for  $82.5  million.  That’s the most anyone has ever paid for a  painting.   

Van Gogh is a painter who is well known for his outstanding artwork.  Vincent Van Gogh used his personality into making his paintings stick out and catch the world’s eyes and draw them in.  This also made them want to see more of his fascinating artwork.  Being an artist takes a lot of work you have to want it and be passionate about it, that’s one of the reasons why Van  Gogh’s  paintings were so successful.  Van Gogh became an artist because of the kind of paintings that he had done.  Why because people could look at the paintings and get something out of it.  When Van Gogh made his very first painting people noticed something that not many others had the ability to do,  he made his paintings mean something not only to himself but to others as well.  His paintings were known as capacity which basically means it is able to move the human imaginations.  Vincent Van  Gogh was successful as an artist because he knew how to make his art speak to the audience.  One of his paintings that’s called,  The  Starry  Night is one of them that is known as a  sublime artwork because it speaks to all kinds of people.  All of Van  Gogh’s  art has some type of meaning to it.  Most painters including Van  Gogh have to have an inspiration for them to create their artwork.  Being successful as an artist isn't just about personality,  but it’s  about your artistic ability to make something great that you and others will enjoy.  

The Starry Night is a work of crucial importance.  Not only is it one of the artist's most moving and beautiful paintings but its style is a turning point. Its subject was of special symbolic significance to the artist, and the struggle, internal and external, which involved the picture throws a  clear light upon one of the fundamental conflicts which have engaged the artists of the past hundred years.  This is the conflict between fact and feeling, between prose and poetry,  between realism and imaginative vision.  Largely self-taught, Van Gogh produced more than two-thousand oil paintings,  watercolors,  drawings, and sketches,  which became in demand only after his death.  He also wrote scores of letters, especially to his brother Theo,  in which he worked out his thoughts about art. “Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better and better,” He wrote in 1874.  “Painters understand nature and love it, and  teach us  to  see.” Even though it garnered only a very limited following during his lifetime, Vincent  Van  Gogh's  artistic style had a  considerable impact on scores of artists who followed.  His work heralded the development of the Fauvism, Expressionism and  Modernism schools of the twentieth century.   In the decade following Van Gogh's  death,  his former colleagues,  including  Gauguin,  Paul  Cezanne,  and  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as well as contemporaries such as  Edvard  Munch and  Gustav  Klimt continued to innovate,  incorporating influences from the now-mainstream school of Impressionism as well as  Van  Gogh's  brand of  Post-Expressionism into new artistic styles.  Just like Shakespeare on literature, and  Freud on psychology,  Vincent  Van  Gogh's influence on modern art is extraordinary.  Van Gogh did not live to see his talent recognized.  Nor could he possibly ever have dreamed that he would be an enduring source of inspiration for subsequent generations of artists.  The career of Vincent  Van Gogh as a  painter was short,  but his paintings revolutionized artistic practice and styles. The intensity of his vision, his wonderful sense of color and the extraordinary boldness of his technique created masterpieces that exercised a profound influence on the art of the twentieth century.   

It was nature, and the people living close to it, that first stirred Van Gogh’s artistic inclinations.  In this, he was not alone.  Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art.  Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city, many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand,  feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work.  Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside; his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.

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