Vincent Van Gogh, postimpressionist painter, works are perhaps better known than those of any other painter. His brief, turbulent, and tragic, life is thought to epitomize the mad genius legend. During his lifetime, Van Gogh’s work was represented in two very small very small exhibitions and two larger ones.   Only one of Van Gogh’s paintings was sold while he lived. The great majority of the works by which he is remembered were produced in 29 months of frenzied activity and profound despair that finally ended in his suicide. In his grim struggle Vincent had one constant ally and support his younger brother Theo, to who he wrote revealing and extraordinarily beautiful letters detailing his conflicts and aspirations. 

 

Van Gogh was largely self-taught as an artist. His first works were heavily painted, mud-colored and clumsy attempt to represent the life of the poor.

 

In 1886 Van Gogh joined Theo in Paris, where he met the foremost French painters of the postimpressionist period—Gauguin, Pissaro, Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. The kindly Pissaro convinced him to adopt a colorful palette and thereby made a tremendously significant contribution to Van Gogh’s art. In Paris, he discovered color as well as the divisionist ideas, which helped to create the distinctive dashed brushstrokes of his later work. His paint Pere Tanguy 1887) was the first complete and successful work in his new colors. Impressed by the theories of Seurat and Signac, Van Gogh briefly adopted a pointillist style.

 

In 1888, in ill health and longing for a release from Paris and what he felt was his imposition upon Theo’s life, he took a house at Arles. In Arles, the hot reds and yellows of the Mediterranean immediately struck him.  At Arles Gauguin joined him for a brief period fraught with tension, during which he mutilated his left ear in the course of his first attack of dementia. His paintings from this period include the incomparable series of sunflowers (1888), The Night Café and Public Gardens in Arles.

 

In 1889, he became a voluntary patient at the St. Remy asylum, where he continued to paint, often making copies of artists he admired. His palette softened to mauves and pinks, but his brushwork was increasingly agitated, the dashes constructed into swirling, twisted shapes, often seen as symbolic of his mental state.

 

Van Gogh’s last three months was spent in Auvers near Pissaro, painting he the postman Roulin.  He grew increasingly despondent and ultimately shot himself, dying in the arms of his brother Theo.