He Who Took His Life As Lovers Often Do

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch draughtsman and painter, classified as a Post-Impressionist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world’s best known, most popular and most expensive pieces. His popularity is widely due to the connotation of the lone, tortured, mad, bohemian artist—indeed, Vincent had several relationships, but did not marry and had no children. The fact that he cut off his ear is part of popular lore, as is the belief that he was driven to an early suicide by lack of recognition of his genius. Here reality and myth are intertwined, and although he certainly suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness, his suicide was preceded by growing praise for his work from radical critics and fellow avant-garde artists—something which paradoxically caused the painter considerable anguish.

Van Gogh spent his early life as an art dealer, teacher and preacher in England, Holland and Belgium. His period as an artist began in 1880 and lasted for a decade, initially with work in sombre colours, until an encounter in Paris with Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism accelerated his artistic development. He produced all of his work, some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known work was produced in the final two years of his life, and in the two months before his death he painted 90 pictures. Following his death, his fame grew slowly, helped by the devoted promotion of it by his widowed sister-in-law.

Largely self-taught, his work was startlingly innovative from the very beginning. Neither his early realist work, though close to the Dutch tradition, nor his later impressionist phase met contemporary expectations. His depictions of everyday life evidenced a highly personal use of media, marked by a bold and distorted draughtsmanship, and markings of the brush sometimes dotted or dashed, paint sometimes applied in swirling or wave-like patterns, which are intensely yet subtly coloured. Since his death in 1890, van Gogh has been acknowledged as a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism and has had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists. The emotional force of his art may be seen as begetting a lineage that follows through to the Abstract Expressionism of Willem de Kooning and the British painter Francis Bacon.

The central figure in Vincent van Gogh’s life was his brother Theo, an art dealer with the firm of Goupil & Cie, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards, which were published in 1914, by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Theo’s widow, who generously supported most of the early Van Gogh exhibitions with loans from the artist’s estate. (Source: Wikipedia)

“Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes.
Only when I fall do I get up again.” ~Vincent