What nationality was the painter Vincent Van Gogh?
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Painting.txt Vincent_van_Gogh.txt
Painting Vincent van Gogh
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium  to a solid surface (support base). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.

Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture (as in gestural painting), composition, narration (as in narrative art), or abstraction (as in abstract art), among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner.  Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic (as in Symbolist art), emotive (as in Expressionism), or political in nature (as in Artivism).

A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery, to Biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin.

In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. The support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay, leaf, copper and concrete, and the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, clay, paper, plaster, gold leaf, as well as objects. The term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders.

Elements

Intensity

What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity; by using just color (of the same intensity) one can only represent symbolic shapes. Thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization (perspective), and symbols. For example, a painter perceives that a particular white wall has different intensity at each point, due to shades and reflections from nearby objects, but, ideally, a white wall is still a white wall in pitch darkness. In technical drawing, thickness of line is also ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters.

Color and tone

Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, white is. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe,  Kandinsky,  and Newton,  have written their own color theory.

Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic (primary) and derived (complementary or mixed) colors (like red, blue, green, brown, etc.).

Painters deal practically with pigments,  so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, means of painting. Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music (like a C note) is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, and "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music. These elements do not necessarily form a melody (in music) of themselves; rather, they can add different contexts to it.

Non-traditional elements

Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required.

Rhythm

Rhythm is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence", then there can be rhythm in paintings. These pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, melody, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, and it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work. This is because the aesthetical value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom (of movement) of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetical value.

History

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, which some historians believe are about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment, and they show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth, abstract designs and what are possibly partial human figures. However, the earliest evidence of the act of painting has been discovered in two rock-shelters in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. In the lowest layer of material at these sites, there are used pieces of ochre estimated to be 60,000 years old. Archaeologists have also found a fragment of rock painting preserved in a limestone rock-shelter in the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia, that is dated 40,000 years old.  There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, Mexico,  etc. In Western cultures, oil painting and watercolor painting have rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historically predominated the choice of media, with equally rich and complex traditions.

The invention of photography had a major impact on painting. In the decades after the first photograph was produced in 1829, photographic processes improved and became more widely practiced, depriving painting of much of its historic purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world. A series of art movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—notably Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism—challenged the Renaissance view of the world. Eastern and African painting, however, continued a long history of stylization and did not undergo an equivalent transformation at the same time.

Modern and Contemporary Art has moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation in favour of concept, leading some to say, in the 1960s, that painting as a serious art form is dead. This has not deterred the majority of living painters from continuing to practice painting either as whole or part of their work. The vitality and versatility of painting in the 21st century defies the previous "declarations" of its demise. In an epoch characterized by the idea of pluralism, there is no consensus as to a representative style of the age. Artists continue to make important works of art in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments—their merits are left to the public and the marketplace to judge.

Among the continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century are Monochrome painting, Hard-edge painting, Geometric abstraction, Appropriation, Hyperrealism, Photorealism, Expressionism, Minimalism, Lyrical Abstraction, Pop Art, Op Art, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Neo-expressionism, Collage, Intermedia painting, Assemblage painting, Computer art painting, Postmodern painting, Neo-Dada painting, Shaped canvas painting, environmental mural painting, traditional figure painting, Landscape painting, Portrait painting, and paint-on-glass animation.

Aesthetics and theory

Aesthetics is the study of art and beauty; it was an important issue for 18th- and 19th-century philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle also theorized about art and painting in particular. Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system; he maintained that painting cannot depict the truth—it is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting. By the time of Leonardo, painting had become a closer representation of the truth than painting was in Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "" ("").  Kant distinguished between Beauty and the Sublime, in terms that clearly gave priority to the former. Although he did not refer to painting in particular, this concept was taken up by painters such as J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and, in his aesthetic essay, wrote that painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetry and Music, for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose.   Painters who have written theoretical works on painting include Kandinsky and Paul Klee.   In his essay, Kandinsky maintains that painting has a spiritual value, and he attaches primary colors to essential feelings or concepts, something that Goethe and other writers had already tried to do.

Iconography is the study of the content of paintings, rather than their style. Erwin Panofsky and other art historians first seek to understand the things depicted, before looking at their meaning for the viewer at the time, and finally analyzing their wider cultural, religious, and social meaning. 

In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting—before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."  Thus, many 20th-century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the means of painting rather than on the external world—nature—which had previously been its core subject. Recent contributions to thinking about painting have been offered by the painter and writer Julian Bell. In his book What is Painting?, Bell discusses the development, through history, of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas.  In Mirror of The World, Bell writes:

A work of art seeks to hold your attention and keep it fixed: a history of art urges it onwards, bulldozing a highway through the homes of the imagination. 

Painting media

Different types of paint are usually identified by the medium that the pigment is suspended or embedded in, which determines the general working characteristics of the paint, such as viscosity, miscibility, solubility, drying time, etc.

Oil

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil, such as linseed oil, which was widely used in early modern Europe. Often the oil was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body and gloss. Oil paint eventually became the principal medium used for creating artworks as its advantages became widely known. The transition began with Early Netherlandish painting in northern Europe, and by the height of the Renaissance oil painting techniques had almost completely replaced tempera paints in the majority of Europe.

Pastel

Pastel is a painting medium in the form of a stick, consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder.  The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation. The color effect of pastels is closer to the natural dry pigments than that of any other process.  Because the surface of a pastel painting is fragile and easily smudged, its preservation requires protective measures such as framing under glass; it may also be sprayed with a fixative. Nonetheless, when made with permanent pigments and properly cared for, a pastel painting may endure unchanged for centuries. Pastels are not susceptible, as are paintings made with a fluid medium, to the cracking and discoloration that result from changes in the color, opacity, or dimensions of the medium as it dries.

Acrylic

Acrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry. Depending on how much the paint is diluted (with water) or modified with acrylic gels, media, or pastes, the finished acrylic painting can resemble a watercolor or an oil painting, or have its own unique characteristics not attainable with other media. The main practical difference between most acrylics and oil paints is the inherent drying time. Oils allow for more time to blend colors and apply even glazes over under-paintings. This slow drying aspect of oil can be seen as an advantage for certain techniques, but in other regards it impedes the artist trying to work quickly.

Watercolor 

Watercolor is a painting method in which the paints are made of pigments suspended in a water-soluble vehicle. The traditional and most common support for watercolor paintings is paper; other supports include papyrus, bark papers, plastics, vellum or leather, fabric, wood and canvas. In East Asia, watercolor painting with inks is referred to as brush painting or scroll painting. In Chinese, Korean, and Japanese painting it has been the dominant medium, often in monochrome black or browns. India, Ethiopia and other countries also have long traditions. Finger-painting with watercolor paints originated in China. Watercolor pencils (water-soluble color pencils) may be used either wet or dry.

Ink

Ink paintings are done with a liquid that contains pigments and/or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing with a pen, brush, or quill. Ink can be a complex medium, composed of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescers, and other materials. The components of inks serve many purposes; the ink’s carrier, colorants, and other additives control flow and thickness of the ink and its appearance when dry.

Hot wax or encaustic

Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, involves using heated beeswax to which colored pigments are added. The liquid/paste is then applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other materials are often used. The simplest encaustic mixture can be made from adding pigments to beeswax, but there are several other recipes that can be used—some containing other types of waxes, damar resin, linseed oil, or other ingredients. Pure, powdered pigments can be purchased and used, though some mixtures use oil paints or other forms of pigment. Metal tools and special brushes can be used to shape the paint before it cools, or heated metal tools can be used to manipulate the wax once it has cooled onto the surface. Other materials can be encased or collaged into the surface, or layered, using the encaustic medium to adhere it to the surface.

Fresco

Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, done on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Italian word affresco, which derives from the Latin word for fresh. Frescoes were often made during the Renaissance and other early time periods.
Buon fresco technique consists of painting in pigment mixed with water on a thin layer of wet, fresh lime mortar or plaster, for which the Italian word for plaster, intonaco, is used. A secco painting, in contrast, is done on dry plaster (secco is "dry" in Italian). The pigments require a binding medium, such as egg (tempera), glue or oil to attach the pigment to the wall.

Gouache

Gouache is a water-based paint consisting of pigment and other materials designed to be used in an opaque painting method. Gouache differs from watercolor in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher, and an additional, inert, white pigment such as chalk is also present. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities. Like all watermedia, it is diluted with water. 

Enamel

Enamels are made by painting a substrate, typically metal, with frit, a type of powdered glass. Minerals called color oxides provide coloration. After firing at a temperature of 750–850 degrees Celsius (1380–1560 degrees Fahrenheit), the result is a fused lamination of glass and metal. Enamels have traditionally been used for decoration of precious objects,  but have also been used for other purposes. In the 18th century, enamel painting enjoyed a vogue in Europe, especially as a medium for portrait miniatures.  In the late 20th century, the technique of porcelain enamel on metal has been used as a durable medium for outdoor murals. 

Spray paint

Aerosol paint (also called spray paint) is a type of paint that comes in a sealed pressurized container and is released in a fine spray mist when depressing a valve button. A form of spray painting, aerosol paint leaves a smooth, evenly coated surface. Standard sized cans are portable, inexpensive and easy to store. Aerosol primer can be applied directly to bare metal and many plastics.

Speed, portability and permanence also make aerosol paint a common graffiti medium. In the late 1970s, street graffiti writers' signatures and murals became more elaborate and a unique style developed as a factor of the aerosol medium and the speed required for illicit work. Many now recognize graffiti and street art as a unique art form and specifically manufactured aerosol paints are made for the graffiti artist. A stencil protects a surface, except the specific shape to be painted. Stencils can be purchased as movable letters, ordered as professionally cut logos or hand-cut by artists.

Tempera

Tempera, also known as egg tempera, is a permanent, fast-drying painting medium consisting of colored pigment mixed with a water-soluble binder medium (usually a glutinous material such as egg yolk or some other size). Tempera also refers to the paintings done in this medium. Tempera paintings are very long lasting, and examples from the first centuries CE still exist. Egg tempera was a primary method of painting until after 1500 when it was superseded by the invention of oil painting. A paint commonly called tempera (though it is not) consisting of pigment and glue size is commonly used and referred to by some manufacturers in America as poster paint.

Water miscible oil paint

Water miscible oil paints (also called "water soluble" or "water-mixable") is a modern variety of oil paint engineered to be thinned and cleaned up with water, rather than having to use chemicals such as turpentine. It can be mixed and applied using the same techniques as traditional oil-based paint, but while still wet it can be effectively removed from brushes, palettes, and rags with ordinary soap and water. Its water solubility comes from the use of an oil medium in which one end of the molecule has been altered to bind loosely to water molecules, as in a solution.

Digital painting 

Digital "painting" is form of art developed alongside computer technology. It adapts traditional painting media such as acrylic paint, oils, ink, watercolor, etc. and simulates the application of pigment to traditional carriers, such as woven canvas cloth, paper, polyester etc. by means of computer software, driving industrial robotic or office machinery (printers). As a technique, it refers to a computer graphics software program that uses a virtual canvas and virtual painting box of brushes, colors and other supplies. The virtual box contains many instruments that do not exist outside the computer, and which give a digital artwork a different look and feel from an artwork that is made the traditional way.

Painting styles

Style is used in two senses: It can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work. It can also refer to the movement or school that an artist is associated with. This can stem from an actual group that the artist was consciously involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word 'style' in the latter sense has fallen out of favor in academic discussions about contemporary painting, though it continues to be used in popular contexts. Such movements or classifications include the following:

Western

Modernism

Modernism describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.   The term encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction). 

Impressionism

The first example of modernism in painting was impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon.

Abstract styles

Abstract painting uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition that may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.   Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement that combined the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools—such as Futurism, the Bauhaus and Synthetic Cubism and the image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic. 

Action painting, sometimes called gestural abstraction, is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied.  The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist. The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms "action painting" and "abstract expressionism" interchangeably).

Other modernist styles include:
*Color Field
*Lyrical Abstraction
*Hard-edge painting
*Expressionism
*Cubism
*Pop art

Outsider art

The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut (, "raw art" or "rough art"), a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.  Outsider art has emerged as a successful art marketing category (an annual Outsider Art Fair has taken place in New York since 1992). The term is sometimes misapplied as a catch-all marketing label for art created by people outside the mainstream "art world," regardless of their circumstances or the content of their work.

Photorealism

Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information, creating a painting that appears to be very realistic like a photograph. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a full-fledged art movement, Photorealism evolved from Pop Art    and as a counter to Abstract Expressionism.

Hyperrealism is a genre of painting and sculpture resembling a high-resolution photograph. Hyperrealism is a fully fledged school of art and can be considered an advancement of Photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures. The term is primarily applied to an independent art movement and art style in the United States and Europe that has developed since the early 2000s. 

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members. Surrealist artworks feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works being an artifact. Leader André Breton was explicit in his assertion that Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.

Surrealism developed out of the Dada activities of World War I and the most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries and languages, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

Far Eastern

*Chinese
**Tang Dynasty
**Ming Dynasty
**Shan shui
**Ink and wash painting
**Hua niao
**Southern School
***Zhe School
***Wu School
**Contemporary
*Japanese
**Yamato-e
**Rimpa school
**Emakimono
**Kanō school
**Shijō school
**Superflat
*Korean

Islamic

*Persian miniature
*Mughal miniature
*Ottoman miniature

Indian

*Oriya school
*Bengal school
*Kangra
*Madhubani
*Mysore
*Rajput
*Mughal
*Samikshavad
*Tanjore
*Warli

African

*Tingatinga

Contemporary art

Idioms

Allegory

Allegory is a figurative mode of representation conveying meaning other than the literal. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in realistic painting. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the grim reaper. Viewers understand that the image of the grim reaper is a symbolic representation of death.

Bodegón

In Spanish art, a bodegón is a still life painting depicting pantry items, such as victuals, game, and drink, often arranged on a simple stone slab, and also a painting with one or more figures, but significant still life elements, typically set in a kitchen or tavern. Starting in the Baroque period, such paintings became popular in Spain in the second quarter of the 17th century. The tradition of still life painting appears to have started and was far more popular in the contemporary Low Countries, today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in southern Europe. Northern still lifes had many subgenres: the breakfast piece was augmented by the trompe-l'œil, the flower bouquet, and the vanitas. In Spain there were much fewer patrons for this sort of thing, but a type of breakfast piece did become popular, featuring a few objects of food and tableware laid on a table.

Body painting

Body painting is a form of body art. Unlike tattoo and other forms of body art, body painting is temporary, painted onto the human skin, and lasts for only several hours, or at most (in the case of Mehndi or "henna tattoo") a couple of weeks. Body painting that is limited to the face is known as face painting. Body painting is also referred to as (a form of) temporary tattoo; large scale or full-body painting is more commonly referred to as body painting, while smaller or more detailed work is generally referred to as temporary tattoos.

Figure painting

A figure painting is a work of art in any of the painting media with the primary subject being the human figure, whether clothed or nude.
Figure painting may also refer to the activity of creating such a work. The human figure has been one of the contrast subjects of art since the first stone age cave paintings, and has been reinterpreted in various styles throughout history.  Some artists well known for figure painting are Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet.

Illustration painting

Illustration paintings are those used as illustrations in books, magazines, and theater or movie posters and comic books. Today, there is a growing interest in collecting and admiring the original artwork. Various museum exhibitions, magazines and art galleries have devoted space to the illustrators of the past. In the visual art world, illustrators have sometimes been considered less important in comparison with fine artists and graphic designers. But as the result of computer game and comic industry growth, illustrations are becoming valued as popular and profitable art works that can acquire a wider market than the other two, especially in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and USA.

Landscape painting

Landscape painting is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects. The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases.

Portrait painting

Portrait paintings are representations of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. The art of the portrait flourished in Ancient Greek and especially Roman sculpture, where sitters demanded individualized and realistic portraits, even unflattering ones. One of the best-known portraits in the Western world is Leonardo da Vinci's painting titled Mona Lisa, which is thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo. 

Still life

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects—which may be either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on). With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Greek/Roman art, still life paintings give the artist more leeway in the arrangement of design elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture. Still life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted. Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.

Veduta

A veduta is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting of a cityscape or some other vista. This genre of landscape originated in Flanders, where artists such as Paul Bril painted vedute as early as the 16th century. As the itinerary of the Grand Tour became somewhat standardized, vedute of familiar scenes like the Roman Forum or the Grand Canal recalled early ventures to the Continent for aristocratic Englishmen. In the later 19th century, more personal impressions of cityscapes replaced the desire for topographical accuracy, which was satisfied instead by painted panoramas. Vincent Willem van Gogh (; 30 March 1853 - 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. He was highly prolific and often completed more than one painting per day. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by symbolic colours and dramatic, impulsive, highly expressive paintwork. He sold only one painting during his lifetime and was largely unnoticed by critics until his suicide, aged 37, which followed years of poverty and mental illness.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh was thoughtful and intellectual as a child, but showed signs of mental instability. He worked as an art dealer as a young man, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion, spending time as a missionary in southern Belgium, and later drifting in ill-health and solitude. He was keenly aware of modernist trends in art, and after moving back home with his parents, took up painting in 1881 with the financial support of his younger brother Theo, who kept up a long correspondence of letters with him. Many of his early works depict common and peasant labourers, and contain few signs of the vivid colour that distinguished his mature period when he broadened his subject matter to include olive trees, cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. In 1886 he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. From then his paintings grew brighter in colour as he developed a style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in 1888. There he lived in the "Yellow House", and with the French artist Paul Gauguin developed a concept of colour that symbolised inner emotion.

Van Gogh suffered from continued psychotic episodes and delusions, an though he worried about his mental stability he often neglected his physical health, not eating and drinking heavily. His friendship with Gauguin came to an end after a violent encounter when he threatened the Frenchman with a razor, and in a rage, cut off part of his own right ear. While in a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy his condition stabilised, leading to one of the more productive periods of his life. He moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise under the care of the homeopathic doctor and artist, Paul Gachet. While there, Theo wrote that he could no longer support him financially. A few weeks later, on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh walked into a wheat field and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died from his injuries two days later.

Considered a madman and a failure in his lifetime, Van Gogh exists in the public imagination as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist "where discourses on madness and creativity converge." His widespread critical, commercial and popular success began after his adoption by the early 20th-century Fauves and German Expressionists. His reputation continued to grow steadily and today he is remembered as an important but tragic painter, whose troubled personality typifies the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Art historians typically view him as an exceptionally talented and influential artist whose mental instability inhibited and frustrated his artistic progression.

Letters

The most comprehensive primary source for understanding Van Gogh is the correspondence between him and his younger brother. Theo van Gogh was an art dealer and provided his brother with financial and emotional support, and access to influential people on the contemporary art scene. The first letter, from Vincent to Theo, was written in August 1872 while Theo was still at school, and they continued to correspond throughout their lives.

Their lifelong friendship, and most of what is known of Vincent's thoughts and theories of art, are recorded in the hundreds of letters they exchanged between 1872 and 1890. Vincent's letters are eloquent and expressive, have been described as having a "diary-like intimacy", and in parts read like autobiography. The art historian and translator of the letters, Arnold Pomerans, wrote that "the publication of these letters added a fresh dimension to the understanding of Van Gogh's artistic achievement, an understanding granted us by virtually no other painter." Theo saved all of Vincent's letters, and his widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger had some of them published in 1906 and 1913; the majority were published in 1914.

There are more than 600 letters from Vincent to Theo, and 40 from Theo to Vincent. In addition there are 22 to his sister Wil, 58 to the painter Anthon van Rappard, 22 to Émile Bernard, and individual letters to Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin and the critic Albert Aurier. Some are annotated with sketches. Many are undated, but art historians have been able to place most in chronological order. Problems in transcription and dating remain, mainly with those from Arles. While there, Vincent wrote around 200 letters, in Dutch, French and English. The period when he lived in Paris is the most difficult to put together because the brothers lived together and had no need to correspond.

Life

Early years

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, in the predominantly Catholic province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. He was the oldest surviving child of Theodorus van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Van Gogh was given the name of his grandfather, and of a brother stillborn exactly a year before his birth. Vincent was a common name in the Van Gogh family: his grandfather, Vincent (1789–1874), received a degree in theology at the University of Leiden in 1811, and had six sons, three of whom became art dealers. His grandfather may have been named after his own father's uncle, a sculptor (1729–1802).

His mother came from a prosperous family in The Hague, and his father was the youngest son of a minister. The two met when Anna's younger sister, Cornelia, married Theodorus's older brother Vincent (Cent). Van Gogh's parents married in May 1851 and moved to Zundert. His brother Theo was born on 1 May 1857. There was another brother, Cor, and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna, and Willemina (known as "Wil"). In later life Van Gogh remained in touch only with Willemina and Theo. Van Gogh's mother was a rigid and religious woman who emphasised the importance of family to the point of claustrophobia for those around her, according to the Van Gogh biographers Naifeh and Smith. Although Theodorus's salary was modest, the Church supplied the family with a house, a maid, two cooks, a gardener, a carriage and horse, and Anna instilled in the children a duty to uphold the family's high social position.

Van Gogh was a serious and thoughtful child. He was taught at home by Anna and a governess, and in 1860 was sent to the village school. In 1864 he was placed in a boarding school at Zevenbergen, where he felt abandoned, and campaigned to come home. In 1866 he moved to the middle school in Tilburg, where he was deeply unhappy. Van Gogh's interest in art began at a young age; his early drawings are expressive, but do not approach the intensity developed in his later work. Constantijn C. Huysmans, a successful artist in Paris, taught the students at Tilburg. His philosophy was to reject technique in favour of capturing the impressions of things, particularly nature or common objects. Van Gogh's profound unhappiness seems to have overshadowed the lessons, which had little effect. In March 1868, Van Gogh abruptly returned home. Later he wrote that his youth was "austere and cold, and sterile."

In July 1869, Van Gogh's uncle Cent obtained a position for him at the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague. After completing his training  in 1873, Van Gogh was transferred to Goupil's London branch, at 17 Southampton Street, and took lodgings at 87 Hackford Road, Stockwell. This was a happy time for Van Gogh; he was successful at work, and at 20 was earning more than his father. Theo's wife later remarked that this was the best year of his life. He became infatuated with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but was rejected after confessing his feelings; she was secretly engaged to a former lodger. Van Gogh grew more isolated, and religiously fervent. His father and uncle arranged a transfer to Paris, where he became difficult and resentful of issues such as the degree to which the firm commodified art, and was eventually dismissed.

Van Gogh returned to England, taking unpaid work as a supply teacher in a small boarding school in Ramsgate. When the proprietor moved to Isleworth, Middlesex, Van Gogh went with him. The arrangement did not work out and he left to become a Methodist minister's assistant. His parents had meanwhile moved to Etten; in 1876 he returned home at Christmas for six months and took work at a bookshop in Dordrecht. He was unhappy in the position and spent his time doodling or translating passages from the Bible into English, French and German. He immersed himself in religion, and became increasingly pious and monastic. According to his room-mate of the time, Paulus van Görlitz, Van Gogh ate frugally, avoiding meat.

To support Van Gogh's religious convictions and his desire to become a pastor, in 1877 the family sent him to stay with an uncle in Amsterdam to study theology. Van Gogh prepared for the entrance examination with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian. He failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan's house in July 1878. He undertook, but also failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool, a Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.

In January 1879, Van Gogh took a post as a missionary at Petit-Wasmes in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium.  To show support for his impoverished congregation, he gave up his comfortable lodgings at a bakery to a homeless person, and moved to a small hut where he slept on straw. His squalid living conditions did not endear him to church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood". He then walked the 75 km to Brussels, returned briefly to Cuesmes in the Borinage, but gave in to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten. He stayed there until around March 1880, which caused concern and frustration for his parents. There was particular conflict between Van Gogh and his father, who considered committing him to the lunatic asylum at Geel.

Returning to Cuesmes that August, he lodged with a miner until October. He became interested in the people and scenes around him, and recorded them in drawings after Theo's suggestion that he take up art in earnest. He travelled to Brussels later in the year, to follow Theo's recommendation that he study with the Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded him – in spite of his dislike of formal schools of art – to attend the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts. He registered at the Académie in November 1880, where he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modelling and perspective.

Etten, Drenthe and The Hague

Van Gogh returned to Etten in April 1881 for an extended stay with his parents. He continued to draw, often using his neighbours as subjects. In August 1881, his recently widowed cousin, Kee Vos-Stricker, daughter of his mother's older sister Willamina and Johannes Stricker, arrived for a visit. He was thrilled and took long walks with her that summer. Kee was seven years older than Van Gogh, and had an eight-year-old son. Van Gogh surprised everyone by declaring to her his love, and proposing marriage. She refused with the words "No, nay, never" ("nooit, neen, nimmer").

After Kee returned to Amsterdam, Van Gogh went to The Hague to sell paintings and to meet with his cousin, Anton Mauve. Van Gogh wanted to apprentice himself to Mauve who was successful and was, according to Naifeh and Smith, "the artist Vincent wanted to be". Mauve invited Van Gogh to return in a few months, and suggested he spend the intervening time working in charcoal and pastels; Van Gogh went back to Etten and followed that advice.

Late in November 1881, Van Gogh wrote a letter to Johannes Stricker, which he described to Theo as an attack, and sent it by registered post to ensure its arrival. Within days he left for Amsterdam. Kee would not meet him, and her parents wrote that his "persistence is disgusting." In desperation, he held his left hand in the flame of a lamp, with the words: "Let me see her for as long as I can keep my hand in the flame." He did not recall the event well, but later assumed that his uncle blew out the flame. Kee's father made it clear that her refusal should be heeded and that the two would not marry, largely because of Van Gogh's inability to support himself.

From Amsterdam, Van Gogh went to The Hague and asked Mauve to take him on as a student. Mauve introduced him to watercolours, which Van Gogh worked on for the next month before going home for Christmas. That Christmas he refused to attend church, quarrelling with his father as a result, and left the same day for The Hague.  In January 1882, Mauve introduced him to painting in oil and lent him money to set up a studio. Within a month they fell out, possibly over the viability of drawing from plaster casts. Van Gogh could only afford to hire people from the street as models, a practice of which Mauve seems to have disapproved. In June Van Gogh suffered a bout of gonorrhoea and spent three weeks in hospital. Soon after, he first painted in oil, using money borrowed from Theo. He liked the medium, and spread the oils liberally, scraping from the canvas and working back with the brush. He wrote that he was surprised at how good the results were.

By March 1882, Mauve appears to have suddenly gone cold towards Van Gogh, and stopped replying to his letters.  He had learned of Van Gogh's new domestic arrangement with an alcoholic prostitute, Clasina Maria "Sien" Hoornik (1850–1904), and her young daughter. He had met Sien towards the end of January 1882, when she had a five-year-old daughter and was pregnant. She had previously borne two children who died, but Van Gogh was unaware of this; on 2 July, she gave birth to a baby boy, Willem. When Van Gogh's father discovered the details of their relationship, he put pressure on his son to abandon Sien and her two children. Vincent at first defied him, and considered moving the family out of the city, but in late 1883 he left Sien and the children. Perhaps lack of money pushed Sien back into prostitution; the home became less happy and Van Gogh may have felt family life was irreconcilable with his artistic development. Sien gave her daughter to her mother, and baby Willem to her brother. Willem remembered visiting Rotterdam when he was about 12, when an uncle tried to persuade Sien to marry in order to legitimise the child. He believed Van Gogh was his father, but the timing of his birth makes this unlikely. In 1904, Sien drowned herself in the River Scheldt.

In September 1883, Van Gogh moved to Drenthe in the northern Netherlands. In December, driven by loneliness, he went to stay with his parents, who had been posted to Nuenen, North Brabant.

Emerging artist

Nuenen and Antwerp (1883–86)

In Nuenen, Van Gogh focused on painting and drawing. He completed sketches and paintings of weavers and their cottages, working outside and very quickly. In August 1884, Margot Begemann, a neighbour's daughter and ten years his senior, began joining him on his painting forays; she fell in love, and he reciprocated, though less enthusiastically. They decided to marry, but the idea was opposed by both families, following which Margot took an overdose of strychnine. She was saved when Van Gogh rushed her to a nearby hospital. On 26 March 1885, his father died of a heart attack.

Van Gogh painted several groups of still lifes in 1885. During his two-year stay in Nuenen, he completed numerous drawings and watercolours, and nearly 200 oil paintings. His palette consisted mainly of sombre earth tones, particularly dark brown, and showed no sign of the vivid colouration that distinguishes his later work.

There was interest from collectors in Paris, and Theo asked Vincent whether he had paintings ready to exhibit. In May 1885, Van Gogh completed his first major work, The Potato Eaters, and the series of "peasant character studies"; the culmination of several years of work. When he complained that Theo was not making enough effort to sell his paintings in Paris, his brother responded that the paintings were too dark, and were not in keeping with the current bright style of Impressionism. August saw the first public exhibition of his work, in the shop windows of the paint dealer Leurs in The Hague. After one of his young peasant sitters became pregnant in September 1885, Van Gogh was accused of forcing himself upon her, and the village priest forbade parishioners to model for him.

In November 1885 Van Gogh moved to Antwerp, where he rented a small room above a paint dealer's shop in the rue des Images (Lange Beeldekensstraat). He lived in poverty and ate poorly, preferring to spend the money Theo sent on painting materials and models. Bread, coffee and tobacco were his staple intake. In February 1886, he wrote to Theo saying that he could only remember eating six hot meals since the previous May. His teeth became loose and painful. In Antwerp he applied himself to the study of colour theory and spent time in museumsparticularly studying the work of Peter Paul Rubensand broadened his palette to include carmine, cobalt blue and emerald green. Van Gogh bought Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts in the docklands, later incorporating elements of their style into the background of some of his paintings.

Van Gogh had begun to drink heavily again, especially absinthe. He was treated by Amadeus Cavenaile in February and March 1886, possibly for syphilis; he recorded the treatment of alum irrigation and sitz baths in one of his notebooks. Despite his rejection of academic teaching, he took the higher-level admission exams at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and in January 1886 matriculated in painting and drawing. For most of February, he was ill and run down by overwork, a poor diet and excessive smoking.

File:Vincent van Gogh - Worn Out (F997).jpg|Worn Out, pencil on watercolour paper, 1882. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:Vincent van Gogh - Sorrow.jpg|Sorrow, 1882. In early April 1882 Van Gogh sent this to Theo, referring to it as "the best figure I have drawn yet." The model posing was Clasina (Sien) Hoornik, whom he had met shortly after his arrival in The Hague and lived with her and her daughter afterwards. 
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 129.jpg|Still Life with Straw Hat also Still Life with Yellow Straw Hat, 1881–85. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
File:Stilleven met bijbel - s0008V1962 - Van Gogh Museum.jpg|Still Life with Open Bible, Extinguished Candle and Novel also Still Life with Bible, 1885. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:Vincent van Gogh - Bäuerin beim Umgraben.jpg|Peasant Woman Digging, or Woman with a Spade, Seen from Behind, 1885. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto
File:Vincent van Gogh - Head of a skeleton with a burning cigarette - Google Art Project.jpg|Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, 1885–86. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam|alt=A human skull, bare bones of a neck and shoulders. The skull has a lit cigarette between its teeth.

Paris (1886–88)

Van Gogh moved to Paris in March 1886, beginning a series of moves that the art historian Melissa McQuillan believes also reflects later changes "in style, his reorientation of his enterprise [which] might be linked". She believes that "moving on became a way of avoiding conflict," and a coping mechanism for when the highly idealistic artist was faced with the realities of his then current situation.

In Paris he shared Theo's rue Laval apartment in Montmartre, and studied at Fernand Cormon's studio. In June, they took a larger flat at 54 rue Lepic. In Paris, he painted portraits of friends and acquaintances, still life paintings, views of Le Moulin de la Galette, scenes in Montmartre, Asnières, and along the Seine. In 1885 in Antwerp he had become interested in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and had used them to decorate the walls of his studio; while in Paris he collected hundreds of them. He tried his hand at Japonaiserie, tracing a figure from a reproduction on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre,  The Courtesan or Oiran (after Kesai Eisen) (1887), which he then graphically enlarged in the painting.

After seeing the portrait of Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli at the Galerie Delareybarette, Van Gogh adopted a brighter palette and a bolder attack, particularly in paintings such as his Seascape at Saintes-Maries (1888). Two years later, Vincent and Theo paid for the publication of a book on Monticelli paintings, and Vincent bought some of his works to add to his collection.

Van Gogh learned about Fernand Cormon's atelier from Theo.  Van Gogh worked at the studio in April and May 1886, where he frequented the circle of the Australian artist John Peter Russell, and met fellow students Émile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – who painted a portrait of Van Gogh with pastel. The group congregated at Julien "Père" Tanguy's paint shop (which was, at that time, the only place where Paul Cézanne's paintings were displayed). He had easy access to Impressionist works in Paris. In 1886, two large exhibitions were staged, in which Pointillism and Neo-Impressionism were first exhibited, bringing attention to  Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. Theo kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on Boulevard Montmartre, but Van Gogh had problems acknowledging the new developments in art.

Conflicts arose between the brothers. At the end of 1886, Theo found that living with Vincent was "almost unbearable". By early 1887, they were again at peace, and Vincent had moved to Asnières, a northwestern suburb of Paris, where he became acquainted with Signac. He adopted elements of Pointillism, a technique in which a multitude of small coloured dots are applied to the canvas such that – when seen from a distance – they create an optical blend of hues. The style stresses the ability of complementary colours – including blue and orange – to form vibrant contrasts when juxtaposed.

File:Van Gogh - Ein Paar Schuhe1.jpeg|A Pair of Boots, 1887, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland 
File:WLANL - E V E - Absinthe Van Gogh Museum.jpg|Still Life with Glass of Absinthe and a Carafe, 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Vincent van Gogh - In the café - Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin - Google Art Project 2.jpg|Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin, 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:Van Gogh - la courtisane.jpg|Courtesan (after Eisen), 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:Van Gogh - Portrait of Pere Tanguy 1887-8.JPG|Portrait of Père Tanguy, 1887. Musée Rodin, Paris
File:Vincent van Gogh - Bloeiende pruimenboomgaard- naar Hiroshige - Google Art Project.jpg|The Blooming Plumtree (after Hiroshige), 1887. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
 

	
While in Asnières, Van Gogh painted parks and restaurants and the Seine, including Bridges across the Seine at Asnières. In November 1887, Theo and Vincent befriended Paul Gauguin who had just arrived in Paris. Towards the end of the year, Vincent arranged an exhibition alongside Bernard, Anquetin, and probably Toulouse-Lautrec, at the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet, 43 Avenue de Clichy, Montmartre. In a contemporary account, Bernard wrote that the exhibition was ahead of anything else in Paris. There Bernard and Anquetin sold their first paintings, and Van Gogh exchanged work with Gauguin. Discussions on art, artists, and their social situations started during this exhibition, and continued and expanded to include visitors to the show, like Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien, Signac and Seurat. In February 1888, feeling worn out from life in Paris, he left, having painted more than 200 paintings during his two years there. Hours before his departure, accompanied by Theo, he paid his first and only visit to Seurat in his studio.

Artistic breakthrough

Arles (1888–89)

Ill from drink and suffering from smoker's cough, in February 1888 Van Gogh sought refuge in Arles. He seems to have moved with thoughts of founding a utopian art colony. The Danish artist Christian Mourier-Petersen became his companion for two months, and at first Arles appeared exotic. In a letter, he described it as a foreign country: "The Zouaves, the brothels, the adorable little Arlésienne going to their First Communion, the priest in his surplice, who looks like a dangerous rhinoceros, the people drinking absinthe, all seem to me creatures from another world."

It became one of his more prolific periods: he completed 200 paintings, and more than 100 drawings and watercolours. He was enchanted by the local landscape and light; his works from this period are rich in yellow, ultramarine and mauve. His paintings include harvests, wheat fields and general rural landmarks from the area, including The Old Mill (1888), a picturesque structure bordering the wheat fields. This was one of seven canvases sent to Pont-Aven on 4 October 1888 in an exchange for works with Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Charles Laval and others.

The portrayals of the Arles landscape are informed by his Dutch upbringing; the patchwork of fields and avenues appear flat and lacking perspective, but excel in their use of colour. His new-found appreciation is seen in the range and scope of his work. That March he painted landscapes using a gridded "perspective frame"; three of the works were shown at the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. In April, he was visited by the American artist Dodge MacKnight, who was living nearby at Fontvieille. On 1 May 1888, he signed a lease for 15 francs per month in the eastern wing of the Yellow House at No. 2 Place Lamartine. The rooms were unfurnished and had been uninhabited for some time.

On 7 May, Van Gogh moved from the Hôtel Carrel to the Café de la Gare, having befriended the proprietors, Joseph and Marie Ginoux. The Yellow House had to be furnished before he could fully move in, but Van Gogh was able to use it as a studio. He wanted a gallery to display his work, and started a series of paintings that eventually included Van Gogh's Chair (1888), Bedroom in Arles (1888), The Night Café (1888), Cafe Terrace at Night (September 1888), Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888), and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers (1888), all intended for the décoration for the Yellow House.

Van Gogh wrote that with The Night Café he tried "to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."  When he visited Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer that June, he gave lessons to a Zouave second lieutenant – Paul-Eugène Milliet – and painted boats on the sea and the village. MacKnight introduced Van Gogh to Eugène Boch, a Belgian painter who stayed at times in Fontvieille, and the two exchanged visits in July.

Image:Vincent Willem van Gogh 024.jpg|The Sower (after Millet), 1888
File:Vincent Van Gogh 0014.jpg|Langlois Bridge at Arles, 1888. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
File:Van Gogh - Fischerboote am Strand von Saintes-Maries1.jpeg|Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries, June 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
File:Vincent van Gogh - De slaapkamer - Google Art Project.jpg|Bedroom in Arles, 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:red vineyards.jpg|The Red Vineyard, November 1888. Pushkin Museum, Moscow. Sold to Anna Boch, 1890
File:Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) - The Old Mill (1888).jpg|The Old Mill, 1888. Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Gauguin's visit (1888)

 	

When Gauguin agreed to visit Arles in 1888, Van Gogh hoped for friendship, and the realisation of his idea of an artists' collective. While waiting that August he painted Sunflowers. When Boch visited again, Van Gogh painted a portrait of him, as well as the study The Poet Against a Starry Sky. Boch's sister Anna (1848–1936), also an artist, purchased The Red Vineyard in 1890.

In preparation for Gauguin's visit, Van Gogh bought two beds on advice from his friend, the station's postal supervisor Joseph Roulin, whose portrait he painted. On 17 September he spent the first night in the still sparsely furnished Yellow House. When Gauguin consented to work and live in Arles with him, Van Gogh started to work on The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Van Gogh completed two chair paintings: Van Gogh's Chair and Gauguin's Chair.

After much pleading from Van Gogh, Gauguin arrived in Arles on 23 October, and that November the two finally painted together. Gauguin depicted Van Gogh in his The Painter of Sunflowers: Portrait of Vincent van Gogh, while, uncharacteristically, Van Gogh painted pictures from memory (deferring to Gauguin's ideas) and his The Red Vineyard. Among these "imaginative" paintings is Memory of the Garden at Etten. Their first joint outdoor venture was at the Alyscamps, when they produced Les Alyscamps pendants.

Van Gogh and Gauguin visited Montpellier that December, where they saw works by Courbet and Delacroix in the Musée Fabre. Their relationship began to deteriorate; he admired Gauguin and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, traits that frustrated Van Gogh. They often quarrelled; Van Gogh increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to desert him and the situation, which Van Gogh described as one of "excessive tension," rapidly headed towards crisis point.

File:Le café de nuit (The Night Café) by Vincent van Gogh.jpeg|The Night Café, 1888, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh - Cafe Terrace at Night (Yorck).jpg|Café Terrace At Night, 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum
Image:Vincent Willem van Gogh 028.jpg|Les Arènes, (December 1888), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
File:Van Gogh Entrance to the Public Park in Arles.jpg|Entrance to the Public Park in Arles, 1888, Phillips Collection, Philadelphia
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 138.jpg|Van Gogh's Chair, 1888. National Gallery, London
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 082.jpg|Paul Gauguin's Armchair, 1888, Van Gogh Museum

December 1888

 

The exact sequence of events which led to Van Gogh's removal of his ear is not known. Gauguin claimed, fifteen years later, that the night followed several instances of physically threatening behaviour. Their relationship was complex, and Theo may have owed money to Gauguin, who was suspicious that the brothers were exploiting him financially. It seems likely that Van Gogh had realised that Gauguin was planning to leave. On 23 December, after days of rain with the two men shut in the Yellow House together, there was a contretemps between them. Gauguin's account was that he left the house for a walk and that Van Gogh followed, and "rushed towards me, an open razor in his hand." This account is uncorroborated; Gauguin was almost certainly absent from the Yellow House that night, most likely in a hotel.

After the altercation with Gauguin, Van Gogh returned to his room, where, according to the art historian John Rewald, assaulted by auditory hallucinations, he severed his left ear  (either wholly or in part; accounts differ) with a razor, inducing a severe haemorrhage.  He bandaged the wound, wrapped the ear in paper, and delivered the package to Gabrielle Berlatier, a farmer's teenage daughter nicknamed Rachel, who worked at a brothel both Van Gogh and Gauguin frequented. Van Gogh went home, where he collapsed. He was found unconscious the next morning by a policeman, Alphonse Robert, and taken to hospital. He was treated by Félix Rey, a young doctor who was still in training. The ear was delivered to the hospital, but Rey was unable to reattach it as too much time had elapsed since its removal.

Van Gogh had no recollection of the event, and it is plain that he had suffered an acute psychotic episode. Family letters of the time make it clear that the breakdown had not been unexpected.  He had suffered a nervous collapse three years before in Antwerp, and as early as 1880 his father had proposed committing him to an asylum at Geel. The hospital diagnosis was "generalised delirium", and within a few days the local police ordered that he be placed in hospital care.  Theo was notified by Gauguin who rushed to Arles on 26 or 27 December. Theo had proposed marriage to his old friend Andries Bonger's sister Johanna on 24 December, the day after Vincent's violent act. During the first days of his treatment, Van Gogh repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked for Gauguin, who asked a policeman attending the case to "be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal for him." Gauguin wrote of Van Gogh, "His state is worse, he wants to sleep with the patients, chase the nurses, and washes himself in the coal bucket. That is to say, he continues the biblical mortifications." Visitors to the hospital included Madame Ginoux and Roulin. Gauguin fled Arles, never to see Van Gogh again. They continued to correspond and in 1890 Gauguin proposed they form an artist studio in Antwerp.

Despite a pessimistic diagnosis, Van Gogh recovered and returned to the Yellow House by the beginning of January 1889, but spent the following month between hospital and home, suffering from hallucinations and delusions of poisoning. That March, the police closed his house after a petition by 30 townspeople (including the Ginoux family) who described him as "le fou roux" (the redheaded madman). Two months later, he left Arles and voluntarily entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Around this time, he wrote, "Sometimes moods of indescribable anguish, sometimes moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant." Paul Signac spent time with him in the hospital, and Van Gogh was allowed home in his company. In April, he moved into rooms owned by Dr Rey after floods damaged paintings in his own home.

File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 106.jpg|Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, 1889, private collection
File:Vincent van Gogh - Self-portrait with bandaged ear (1889, Courtauld Institute).jpg|Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
File:Vincent van Gogh - Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey (F500).jpg|Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey, 1889, Pushkin Museum
File:Van Gogh - Garten des Hospitals in Arles1.jpeg|The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection "Am Römerholz", Winterthur, Switzerland
File:Ward in the Hospital in Arles.jpg|Ward in the Hospital in Arles, 1889, Oskar Reinhart Collection "Am Römerholz", Winterthur, Switzerland
File:Van Gogh - Garten des Hospitals in Arles.jpeg|Garden of the Hospital in Arles, April 1889, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
  

Saint-Rémy (May 1889 – May 1890)

Van Gogh entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum on 8 May 1889, accompanied by his carer, Frédéric Salles, a Protestant clergyman. Saint-Paul was a former monastery, in Saint-Rémy less than 30 km from Arles, and at the time run by a former naval doctor, Théophile Peyron. Van Gogh had two small rooms, consisting of adjoining cells with barred windows. The second was to be used as a studio. While there, the clinic and its garden became the main subjects of his paintings. He made several studies of hospital interiors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum and Saint-Rémy (September 1889). Some of his works from this time are characterised by swirls, including The Starry Night. He was allowed short supervised walks, which led to paintings of cypresses and olive trees, such as Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background 1889, Cypresses 1889, Cornfield with Cypresses (1889), Country road in Provence by Night (1890). That September, he produced a further two versions of Bedroom in Arles.

Limited access to life outside the clinic resulted in a shortage of subject matter. Van Gogh was left to work on interpretations of other artist's paintings, such as Millet's The Sower and Noon – Rest from Work (after Millet), as well as variations on his own earlier work. Van Gogh was an admirer of the Realism of Jules Breton, Gustave Courbet and Millet, and he compared his copies to a musician's interpreting Beethoven.

Many of his most compelling works date from this period. His The Round of the Prisoners (1890) was painted after an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883). It has been suggested that the face of the prisoner in the centre of the painting looking towards the viewer is Van Gogh himself, although the Van Gogh scholar Jan Hulsker discounts this.

Between February and April 1890 Van Gogh suffered a severe relapse. He was still able to paint and draw a little during this time, and he later wrote to Theo that he had made a few small canvases "from memory ... reminisces of the North." Among these was Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset. Hulsker believes that this small group of paintings formed the nucleus of many drawings and study sheets depicting landscapes and figures that Van Gogh worked on during this time. He comments that this short period was the only time that Van Gogh's illness had a significant effect on his work. Vincent asked his mother and his brother to send him drawings and small sketches that he had done in the early 1880s so he could work on new paintings from his old sketches. Belonging to this period is Sorrowing Old Man ("At Eternity's Gate"), a colour study that Hulsker describes as "another unmistakable remembrance of times long past."

File:Vincent van Gogh - Corridor in the Asylum.JPG|Corridor in Saint-Paul Hospital, Oil color and essence over black chalk on pink laid ("Ingres") paper, 1889, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York   
File:Hospital in Saint-Remy.jpg| Pine Trees with Figure in the Garden of Saint-Paul Hospital, 1889, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 037.jpg|The Round of the Prisoners (after Doré), 1890. Pushkin Museum, Moscow
File:The Sower.jpg|The Sower, 1888. Kröller-Müller Museum,  Otterlo|alt=A man is scattering seeds in a ploughed field. The figure is represented as small, and is set in the upper right and walking out of the picture. He carries a bag of seed over one shoulder. The ploughed soil is grey, and behind it rises standing crop, and in the left distance, a farmhouse. In the centre of the horizon is a giant yellow rising sun surrounded by emanating yellow rays. A path leads into the picture, and birds are swooping down.
File:Van Gogh - Zwei grabende Bäuerinnen auf schneebedecktem Feld.jpeg|Two Peasant Women Digging in a Snow-Covered Field at Sunset, 1890. Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 002.jpg|Sorrowing Old Man ('At Eternity's Gate'), 1890. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

In February 1890, Van Gogh painted five versions of L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), based on a charcoal sketch Gauguin had produced when she sat for both artists in November 1888. The version intended for Madame Ginoux is lost. It was attempting to deliver this painting to Ginoux in Arles that precipitated his February relapse. Albert Aurier praised his work in the Mercure de France in January 1890, and described him as "a genius".

That February, he was invited by Les XX, a society of avant-garde painters in Brussels, to participate in their annual exhibition. At the opening dinner, Les XX-member Henry de Groux insulted Van Gogh's work. Toulouse-Lautrec demanded satisfaction, and Signac declared he would continue to fight for Van Gogh's honour if Lautrec surrendered. Later, while Van Gogh's exhibit was on display with the Artistes Indépendants in Paris, Claude Monet said that his work was the best in the show. In February 1890, when his nephew was born, he wrote "I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky."

Auvers-sur-Oise (May–July 1890)

In May 1890, Van Gogh left the clinic in Saint-Rémy to move nearer to both Dr Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise and to Theo. Gachet was an amateur painter and had treated several other artists. Camille Pissarro had recommended him. Van Gogh's first impression was that Gachet was "iller than I am, it seemed to me, or let's say just as much." In June 1890, he painted several portraits of his  doctor, including Portrait of Dr. Gachet, and his only etching. In each the emphasis is on Gachet's melancholic disposition.

During Van Gogh's last weeks at Saint-Rémy, his thoughts returned to his "memories of the North", and several of the approximately 70 oils, painted during as many days in Auvers-sur-Oise, are reminiscent of northern scenes. Barbizon painter Charles Daubigny had moved to Auvers in 1861, and in turn drew other artists there, including Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier. In July 1890, Van Gogh completed two paintings of Daubigny's Garden, one of which is likely his final work. There are other paintings that show evidence of being unfinished, including Thatched Cottages by a Hill.

Van Gogh's late paintings show an artist at the height of his abilities, according to the art critic Robert Hughes, "longing for concision and grace". Many of these works are sombre, and reflective of a desire to return to lucid mental health. Yet some reflect deepening concerns. In July 1890, Van Gogh wrote that he had become absorbed "in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow." He had become captivated by the fields in May when the wheat was young and green. In July he described to Theo "vast fields of wheat under turbulent skies". He wrote that they represented his "sadness and extreme loneliness", and that the "canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, that is, how healthy and invigorating I find the countryside." Wheatfield with Crows is a painting Hulsker discusses as being associated with "melancholy and extreme loneliness." Hulsker identifies seven oil paintings as following the completion of the Wheatfield with Crows in July 1890 while in Auvers.

File: Vincent van Gogh - The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise, View from the Chevet - Google Art Project.jpg|The Church at Auvers, 1890. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
File: VanGogh Daubigny.jpg|Daubigny's Garden, 1890. Kunstmuseum Basel
File:Portrait of Dr. Gachet.jpg|Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890. Private collection
File:Vincent van Gogh - Undergrowth with Two Figures (F773).jpg|Undergrowth with Two Figures, June 1890. Cincinnati Museum of Art
Image:Vincent Willem van Gogh 021.jpg|Daubigny's Garden, (second version), 1890, Hiroshima Museum of Art, Hiroshima
File:Vincent van Gogh - Tree Roots and Trunks (F816).jpg|Tree Roots, July, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Death (July 1890)

Van Gogh underwent a further crisis in February 1890. Although depressed and unable to bring himself to write, he continued to draw and paint. For a year he "had fits of despair and hallucination during which he could not work, between long clear months in which he could and did, punctuated by extreme visionary ecstasy."

On 27 July 1890, aged 37, Van Gogh shot himself in the chest with a revolver. There were no witnesses. The location of the shooting may have been in the wheat field he had been painting recently, or a local barn. The bullet was deflected by a rib and passed through his chest without doing apparent damage to internal organs – probably stopped by his spine. He was able to walk back to the Auberge Ravoux, where he was attended by two doctors. Without a surgeon present the bullet could not be removed. The doctors tended to him as best they could, then left him alone in his room, smoking his pipe. The following morning, Theo rushed to his brother as soon as notified, and found him in surprisingly good health. But within hours Vincent began to fail, suffering from an untreated infection resulting from the wound. He died that evening, 29 hours after the gunshot. According to Theo, Vincent's last words were: "The sadness will last forever".

 
Van Gogh was buried on 30 July, in the municipal cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise. The funeral was attended by Theo van Gogh, Andries Bonger, Charles Laval, Lucien Pissarro, Émile Bernard, Julien Tanguy and Dr Gachet among twenty family, friends and locals. Theo suffered from syphilis and his health declined rapidly after Vincent's death. Weak and unable to come to terms with Vincent's absence, he died on 25 January 1891 at Den Dolder, and was buried in Utrecht. In 1914, Jo Bonger had Theo's body exhumed, moved from Utrecht and re-buried with Vincent at Auvers-sur-Oise.

There have been numerous debates as to the nature of Van Gogh's illness and its effect on his work. Over 150 psychiatrists have attempted to label its root, with 30 different diagnoses. These have included schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, syphilis, poisoning from swallowed paints, temporal lobe epilepsy, and acute intermittent porphyria. Any of these could have been the culprit, aggravated by malnutrition, overwork, insomnia and alcohol, especially absinthe.

Style and works

Artistic development

Van Gogh drew and painted with watercolours while at school, but only a few examples survive and the authorship of some has been challenged. When he took up art as an adult, he began at an elementary level. In early 1882, his uncle, Cornelis Marinus, owner of a well-known gallery of contemporary art in Amsterdam, asked for drawings of The Hague. Van Gogh's work did not live up to expectations. Marinus offered a second commission, specifying the subject matter in detail, but was again disappointed with the result. Van Gogh persevered; he improved the lighting of his studio by installing variable shutters and experimented with different drawing materials. For more than a year he worked on single figures – highly elaborate studies in black and white, which at the time gained him only criticism. Today, they are recognised as his first masterpieces.

In August 1882, Theo gave Vincent a donation, used to buy materials for working en plein air. Vincent wrote that he could now "go on painting with new vigour". From early in 1883 he worked on multi-figure compositions, on which he based on his drawings. He had some of them photographed, but when his brother remarked that they lacked liveliness and freshness, he destroyed them and turned to oil painting. Van Gogh turned to renowned Hague School artists like Weissenbruch and Blommers, and received technical support from them, as well as from painters like De Bock and Van der Weele, both second generation Hague School artists. When he moved to Nuenen after the intermezzo in Drenthe he began several large paintings but destroyed most of them. The Potato Eaters and its companion pieces are the only ones to have survived. Following a visit to the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh was aware that many of his faults were due to lack of technical experience, so in November 1885 he travelled to Antwerp and later Paris to learn and develop his skill.

Theo criticised The Potato Eaters for its dark palette, which he thought unsuitable for a modern style. During Van Gogh's stay in Paris between 1886 and 1887, he quickly tried to master a new, lighter palette. His Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887) shows his success with the brighter palette; with its colour innovations it is evidence of an evolving personal style. Charles Blanc's treatise on colour interested him greatly, and led him to work with complementary colours. Van Gogh came to the conclusion that colour went beyond descriptive; he said that "colour expresses something in itself". According to Hughes, Van Gogh perceived colour as having a "psychological and moral weight", as characterised in the garish reds and greens of The Night Cafe, a work he wanted "to express the terrible passions of humanity". Yellow meant the most to him, because it symbolised emotional truth. He used yellow as a symbol for sunlight, life, and God.

Throughout his career Van Gogh strove to be a painter of rural life and nature, and during his first summer in Arles he brought the more modern palette to bear on landscapes and traditional rural life. His belief that a power existed behind the natural led him to try to capture a sense of that power, or the essence of nature in his art, sometimes through the use of symbols. His renditions of the sower, at first copied from Jean-François Millet, reflect Van Gogh's own religious beliefs: the sower as Christ sowing life beneath the hot sun. These were themes and motifs he returned to often to revise, rework and develop. His paintings of flowers are filled with symbolism but not traditional Christian iconography; rather he made up his own where life is lived under the sun and work is an allegory of life. In the summer in Arles, under a hot sun and having gained confidence after painting spring blossoms and learning to capture bright sunlight, he was ready to paint The Sower. The juxtaposition of saturated complementary colours and the single figure in the landscape represents a unique innovative style.

Van Gogh stayed within what he called the "guise of reality", and was critical of overly abstract or stylised works. He tried his hand at stylisation and abstraction with Starry Night, but he said about that painting that reality had "receded too far in the background". Hughes describes Starry Night as a moment of extreme visionary ecstasy: the stars are in a great whirl, reminiscent of Hokusai's Great Wave, the movement in the heaven above is reflected by the movement of the cypress on the earth below, and the painter's vision is "translated into a thick, emphatic plasma of paint."

Between 1885 and his death in 1890, Van Gogh appears to have been building an oeuvre, a collection that reflected his personal vision, and could be commercially successful. He was influenced by Blanc's definition of style, that a true painting required optimal use of colour, perspective and brushstrokes. Van Gogh applied the word "purposeful" to paintings he thought he had mastered, as opposed to those he thought of as studies. He painted many series of studies. Most of them were still lifes, many executed as colour experiments or as gifts to friends. The finished paintings – such as Night Cafe and Starry Night, are the works he considered part of his oeuvre. The work in Arles contributed considerably to his oeuvre: those he thought the most important from that time were The Sower, Night Cafe, Memory of the Garden in Etten and  Starry Night. With their broad brushstrokes, inventive perspectives, colours, contours and designs, these are the paintings that represent the style he sought. He considered The Bedroom his best work of that period, because the inventive use of perspective, combined with Impressionist techniques, resulted in the style he sought.

In the end, the style Van Gogh found was revolutionary "in the very look of his pictures, their coarseness and deliberately unfinished quality, the vigor with which they were painted." His art, with its emphasis on the common people and a wish for a better world, presages the 20th century and Modernism.

Major series

Van Gogh's stylistic developments are usually linked to periods he spent living in different locations across Europe. He was inclined to immerse himself in local cultures and lighting conditions, although he maintained a highly individual visual outlook throughout. His evolution as a painter was slow, and he was aware of his painterly limitations; many of his early works could be described as gauche. He moved home often, perhaps to expose himself to new visual stimuli, and through exposure develop his technical skill.

Portraits

  
Van Gogh is best known for his landscapes, but portraits were his greatest ambition. He said of portrait studies, that they were "the only thing in painting that moves me deeply and that gives me a sense of the infinite." He wrote to his sister that he "should like to paint portraits which appear after a century to people living then as apparitions ... I do not endeavour to achieve this through photographic resemblance, but my means of our impassioned emotions – that is to say using our knowledge and our modern taste for colour as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character." Those closest to him are mostly absent from his portraits; he rarely painted Theo, Van Rappard or Bernard. The portraits of his mother were from photographs.

Portraiture represented Van Gogh's best opportunity of earning money. Some of the portraits are studies. Those with greater significance, which he considered finished paintings, are identifiable with the subject holding an object such as a book, and tend to exhibit more stylisation than his other work.

In December 1888, he painted La Berceuse – a figure that he thought as good as his sunflower still lifes. It had a limited palette, varied brushstrokes and simple contours. It appears to be a culmination of portraits of the Roulin family he executed in Arles between November and December. They showed a shift in style from the fluid and restrained brushstrokes and even surface of Portrait of the Postman to the frenetic style, rough surface, broad brushstrokes and use of a palette knife in Madame Roulin with Baby.

File:Van Gogh - Bildnis der Mutter des Künstlers.jpeg|Portrait of Artist's Mother, October 1888, The Norton Simon Museum of Art, Pasadena, California
File:Vangogh mousme.jpg|La Mousmé, 1888. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
File:Vincent van Gogh - Eugène Boch - Google Art Project.jpg|Eugène Boch, (The Poet Against a Starry Sky), 1888. Musée d'Orsay, Paris
File:Vincent van Gogh - Portret van de postbode Joseph Roulin.jpg|Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1841-1903) early August 1888, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 084.jpg|La Berceuse (Augustine Roulin), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (F unk)
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 086.jpg|Portrait of Patience Escalier, second version, end August 1888, Private collection

Self-portraits

Van Gogh drew or painted more than 43 self-portraits between 1885 and 1889. They were often completed in series, such as those painted in Paris in mid-1887, and continue until his the last weeks of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, when he produced many paintings but no self-portraits, as he returned to painting the natural world. Generally they were studies, created during introspective periods when he was reluctant to mix with others or lacked models, and so painted himself. They reflect a intense degree of self-scrutiny that, according to Hughes, is "seldom if ever" apparent in an artist. Often they mark important transitionalor breakthrough periods in his development, for example with the mid 1887 Paris series, where be became influenced by Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Signac. In Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, heavy strains of paint spread outwards across the canvas, "encircling the head with a background halo".

The self-portraits contain a wide array of physiognomical representations, in which, according to Melissa McQuillan "the entire facial structure seems to belong to different men". His mental and physical condition is usually apparent, he may appear unkempt, unshaven or with a neglected beard, with deeply sunken eyes, a weak jaw, or having suffered loss of teeth. Some show him with full lips, a long face or prominent skull, or sharpened, alert features. His hair may be the usual recognisable red, or at times ash coloured. He wrote, "I...exaggerate my personality...I want to emphasis the fact that one and the same person may furnish motifs for very different portraits."

His gaze is seldom directed at the viewer; and even when fixed, he appears to look elsewhere. They vary in intensity and colour, and in those painted in the aftermath December 1888 especially, the intensely vivid colourisation serves to highlight the haggard pallor of his skin. Some of the portraits depict the artist with beard, some without, and others with bandages – in the period after he had severed his ear. In only a few does he refer to his social class or profession as a painter. Those painted in Saint-Rémy show the head from the right, the side opposite his mutilated ear, as he painted himself reflected in his mirror. 

File:Van Gogh - Selbstbildnisse.jpeg| Two Self-Portraits and Several Details, Drawing, Paris, 1886. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Vincent van Gogh - Self-portrait with grey felt hat - Google Art Project.jpg|Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, Winter 1887–88. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Van_Gogh_Self-Portrait_with_Straw_Hat_1887-Metropolitan.jpg|Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, Paris, Winter 1887–88. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Image:VanGogh-self-portrait-dedicated to gaugin.jpg|Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin, September 1888. Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA 
File:Vincent van Gogh - Self-Portrait - Google Art Project (719161).jpg|Self-Portrait, 1889. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. His Saint-Rémy self-portraits show his side with the unmutilated ear, as he saw himself in the mirror
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 102.jpg|Self-Portrait Without Beard, c. September 1889. This painting may have been Van Gogh's last self-portrait. He gave it to his mother as a birthday gift.  

Flowers

Van Gogh painted several landscapes with flowers, including the Irises, Sunflowers, lilacs and roses sequences. Some reflect his interests in the language of colour, and also in Japanese ukiyo-e.

There are two series of dying sunflowers. The first were painted in Paris in 1887 and show flowers lying on the ground. The second set was completed a year later in Arles, and is of bouquets in a vase positioned in early morning light. Both are built from thickly layered paintwork, which, according to the London National Gallery, evokes the "texture of the seed-heads". 

Van Gogh was not preoccupied by his usual interest in filling his paintings with subjectivity and emotion; rather the two series are intended to display his technical skill and working methods to Gauguin, who was about to visit. The 1888 paintings were created during a rare period of optimism for the artist. Vincent wrote to Theo in August 1888, "I'm painting with the gusto of a Marseillais eating bouillabaisse, which won't surprise you when it's a question of painting large sunflowers ... If I carry out this plan there'll be a dozen or so panels. The whole thing will therefore be a symphony in blue and yellow. I work on it all these mornings, from sunrise. Because the flowers wilt quickly and it's a matter of doing the whole thing in one go."

The sunflowers were painted to decorate the walls in anticipation of Gauguin's visit, and Van Gogh placed individual works around the Yellow House's guest room in Arles. Gauguin was deeply impressed. The only painting Van Gogh  completed during Gauguin's first visit was Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers. Aware of their worth, Gauguin later acquired two of the Paris versions.

After Gauguin's departure, Van Gogh imagined the two major versions of the sunflowers as wings of the Berceuse Triptych, and included them in his Les XX in Brussels exhibit. Today the major pieces of the series are perhaps his best known, celebrated for the sickly connotations of the colour yellow and its tie-in with the Yellow House, the expressionism of the brush strokes, and their contrast against often dark backgrounds.

File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 128.jpg|Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, August 1888. Neue Pinakothek, Munich
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 127.jpg|Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, August 1888. National Gallery, London
File:Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers - VGM F458.jpg|Sunflowers, 1888, repetition of the 4th version (yellow background), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
File:Vincent van Gogh - Sunflowers (Metropolitan Museum of Art).jpg|Sunflowers, 1887, Metropolitan Museum of Art
File:Irises-Vincent van Gogh.jpg|Irises, 1889, J. Paul Getty Museum
File:Vincent van Gogh - Almond blossom - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|240px|Almond Blossom, 1890. Van Gogh Museum

Cypresses

The cypresses, comprising fifteen canvases, are among Van Gogh's most popular and widely known series. In Arles he became fascinated with the trees. He brought life to the trees traditionally emblematic of death, writing of them "The trees are always occupying my thoughts – it astonishes me that they have never been done as I see them". The series of cypresses he began in Arles featured the trees in the distance, as windbreaks in fields; while he was at Saint-Rémy he brought them to the foreground. Vincent wrote to Theo in May 1889: "Cypresses still preoccupy me, I should like to do something with them like my canvases of sunflowers"; he goes on to say "They are beautiful in line and proportion like an Egyptian obelisk."

In mid-1889, at his sister Wil's request, Van Gogh painted several smaller versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses. The works are characterised by swirls and densely painted impasto, and include one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night, in which the cypress dominates the foreground. Hughes writes of the cypress in Starry Night that it is "More alive than any painted tree has ever been, (and more so than any real cypress looks)".

Other works include Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889), Cypresses (1889), Cypresses with Two Figures (1889–90), Road with Cypress and Star (1890) and Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888). Road with Cypress and Star (1890) is as compositionally unreal and artificial as The Starry Night. It represents an exalted experience of reality, what both Van Gogh and Gauguin referred to as an "abstraction". Referring to Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, on or around 18 June 1889, in a letter to his brother, Van Gogh wrote, "At last I have a landscape with olives and also a new study of a Starry Night."

While in the asylum, he spent time outside painting the trees in the olive groves. These are rendered as gnarled and arthritic as if a personification of the natural world, according to Hughes who explains that they are filled with "a continuous field of energy of which nature is a manifestation".

File:Van Gogh Starry Night Drawing.jpg|Cypresses in Starry Night, a reed pen drawing executed by Van Gogh after the painting in 1889. Originally held at Kunsthalle Bremen, today part of the disputed Baldin Collection
File:Van Gogh - Zypressen mit zwei weiblichen Figuren.jpeg|Cypresses and Two Women, 1890, Kröller-Müller Museum
File:Cipressen en twee vrouwen - s0147V1962 - Van Gogh Museum.jpg|Cypresses and Two Women, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
File:Vincent Van Gogh 0020.jpg|Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889. National Gallery, London
File:Vincent van Gogh - Wheat Field with Cypresses - Google Art Project.jpg|Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
File:Vincent Van Gogh 0016.jpg|Cypresses, 1889|Cypresses, 1889, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Orchards

The Flowering Orchards (also the Orchards in Blossom) are among the first groups of work completed after his arrival in Arles in February 1888. The 14 paintings are optimistic, joyous and visually expressive of the burgeoning spring. They are delicately sensitive, silent, quiet and unpopulated. He painted swiftly, and although he brought to this series a version of Impressionism, a strong sense of personal style began to emerge during this period. The transience of the blossoming trees, and the passing of the season, seemed to align with his sense of transience and belief in a new beginning in Arles, and it presented him with a world of Japanese motifs which he revelled in. Vincent wrote to Theo on 21 April 1888 that he had 10 orchards and "one big [painting] of a cherry tree, which I've spoiled".

During this period Van Gogh mastered the use of light by subjugating shadows and bringing light to the forefront of the trees as if the trees and blossoms themselves are the source of light – almost in a sacred manner. Early the following year he painted another smaller group of orchards, including View of Arles, Flowering Orchards. Van Gogh was consumed by the landscape and vegetation of the south of France, and often visited the farm gardens near Arles. Because of the vivid light of the Mediterranean climate his palette significantly brightened.

File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 113.jpg|Souvenir de Mauve, c. 30 March 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum
File:WLANL - artanonymous - De roze boomgaard.jpg|The Pink Orchard also Orchard with Blossoming Apricot Trees, March 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Van Gogh - Blühender Pfirsichbaum1.jpeg|Peach Tree in Blossom, March–April 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Van Gogh - Obstgarten mit blühenden Pflaumenbäumen.jpg|The White Orchard, April 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 
File:Vincent Van Gogh 0018.jpg|View of Arles, Flowering Orchards, 1889. Neue Pinakothek
File:Van Gogh - Blühender Obstgarten, von Zypressen umgeben.jpeg|Orchard in Blossom, Bordered by Cypresses, April, 1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Wheat fields 

Van Gogh made several painting excursions during visits to the landscape around Arles. He made paintings featuring harvests, wheat fields and other rural landmarks of the area, including The Old Mill (1888); a good example of a picturesque structure bordering the wheat fields beyond. At various points, Van Gogh painted the view from his window – at The Hague, Antwerp, and Paris. These works culminated in The Wheat Field series, which depicted the view from his adjoining cells in the asylum at Saint-Rémy.

Many of the late paintings are sombre but essentially optimistic and, right up to the time of his death, reflect his desire to return to lucid mental health. Yet some of his final works reflect his deepening concerns. Writing in July 1890, from Auvers, Van Gogh said that he had become absorbed "in the immense plain against the hills, boundless as the sea, delicate yellow."

He was captivated by the fields in May when the wheat was young and green. His Wheatfields at Auvers with White House shows a more subdued palette of yellows and blues, against the growing wheat and corn, which creates a sense of idyllic harmony.

The weather worsened in July. He wrote to Theo of "vast fields of wheat under troubled skies". In particular, the work Wheatfield with Crows serves as a compelling and poignant expression of the artist's state of mind in his final days, a painting Hulsker describes as a "doom-filled painting with threatening skies and ill-omened crows." Its dark palette and heavy brushstrokes convey a sense of impending doom and menace.

Image:Vincent Willem van Gogh 007.jpg|Enclosed Wheat Field with Rising Sun, May 1889, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh, Dutch - Rain - Google Art Project.jpg|Rain or Enclosed Wheat Field in the Rain, November 1889, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
File:Landscape with wheat sheaves and rising moon.jpg|Wheat Fields (Van Gogh series), early June 1889. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
File:Van Gogh - Heuschober an einem Regentag.jpeg|Wheat Stack Under Clouded Sky, July 1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands 
File:Vincent Willem van Gogh 038.jpg|Wheat Fields near Auvers (June 1890), Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna 
File:Vincent van Gogh - Wheatfield under thunderclouds - Google Art Project.jpg |Wheatfield Under Thunderclouds, 1890. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Posthumous fame

Early popularity

After Van Gogh's first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew slowly but steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887 André Antoine installed Van Gogh's paintings alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889 his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by the poet Albert Aurier as characterised by "fire, intensity, sunshine". Aurier, Van Gogh's first critical champion, died of typhoid fever in 1892 at the age of twenty-seven.

Theo's death in January 1891 had removed Vincent's most vocal and well connected champion. Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger was a Dutchwoman in her twenties who had not known either her husband or her brother-in law very long and who suddenly had to take care of several hundreds of paintings, letters and drawings, as well as her infant son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. Theo had been the sole support of his family, and Van Gogh-Bonger was left with only an apartment in Paris, a few items of furniture, and the near-valueless works of her brother-in-law Vincent. According to Rewald, Gauguin was not inclined to offer assistance in promoting Van Gogh's reputation, and her brother Andries Bonger also seemed to be lukewarm about his work.

Memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions in 1890, including six works at Les XX and ten paintings were shown at the "Société des Artistes Indépendants" while he was still alive, in Brussels that January; in 1891 there was also a retrospective exhibition there. In 1892 the art critic Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh's suicide was an "infinitely sadder loss for art ... even though the populace has not crowned to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived." In 1892, Émile Bernard organised a small solo show of Van Gogh's paintings in Paris, and Julien Tanguy exhibited his Van Gogh paintings with several consigned from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Several Van Gogh paintings were sold in Paris after Tanguy's death in 1894. In April 1894 the Durand-Rue Gallery in Paris agreed to take 10 paintings on consignment from his estate.

In 1896, the Fauvist painter Henri Matisse, then an unknown art student, visited the artist John Peter Russell on Belle Île off Brittany. Russell was an Impressionist; Matisse had never previously seen an Impressionist work directly, and was so shocked at the style that he left after ten days, saying, "I couldn't stand it any more." The next year he returned as Russell's student and abandoned his earth-coloured palette for bright Impressionist colours, later stating, "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained colour theory to me." Russell had been a close friend of Vincent van Gogh. He introduced Van Gogh's work to Matisse and gave him a Van Gogh drawing. In Paris in 1901 a large retrospective was held at the Bernheim-Jaune Galleries, which excited André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, and underscored and contributed to the emergence of the Fauve movement.

Retrospectives were held in Paris in 1901 and 1905, and at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1905. Important group exhibitions with the Sonderbund artists in Cologne in 1912, the Armory Show, New York in 1913, and Berlin in 1914 followed. In 1905 Van Gogh's work was exhibited at Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden, which influenced painters of Die Brücke – particularly Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. By 1906 Johanna van Gogh-Bonger could still show a complete set of his works,  although she was in correspondence with artists, galleries, critics, dealers throughout Europe. She worked with Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer who mounted 10 exhibitions, and staged tours to see Van Gogh's work. Henk Bremmer was instrumental in teaching and talking about Van Gogh, and introduced Helene Kröller-Müller to Van Gogh's art; she quickly became an avid collector.

20th century

Van Gogh's fame reached its first peak in Austria and Germany before World War I, aided by the publication of his letters in three volumes in 1914. These began a compelling mythology of Van Gogh as an intense and dedicated painter who suffered for his art and died young. Bremmer assisted Jacob Baart de la Faille, whose catalogue raisonné Vincent Van Gogh: The Complete Works on Paper appeared in 1928.  In 1934 American novelist Irving Stone published an account of Vincent van Gogh's life entitled Lust for Life, and according to Stone he relied on Van Gogh's letters to Theo. This book and the 1956 film of the same name further enhanced the artist's fame.

In 1957, Francis Bacon based a series of paintings on reproductions of Van Gogh's The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, the original of which was destroyed during World War II. Bacon was inspired by an image he described as "haunting", and by Van Gogh himself, whom he regarded as an alienated outsider, a position which resonated with him. Bacon identified with Van Gogh's theories of art and quoted lines written to Theo: "[R]eal painters do not paint things as they are ... [T]hey paint them as they themselves feel them to be."

The Van Gogh Museum opened in Amsterdam in 1973. When the Rijksmuseum held an exhibition in 1990 for the centenary of Van Gogh's death, paintings came from the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, which house the two largest Van Gogh collections in the world. Additional works were borrowed from 17 countries, 11 of which lent a single work each. The United States was the largest lender, sending works from 13 collections. For the occasion, Beatrix of the Netherlands wrote about the native son of the Netherlands: "Only a small circle of artists showed any interest in his work during his own lifetime. Now he is a household name and his paintings and drawings are admired throughout the world."

Today Van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings. Those sold for over US$100 million (today's equivalent) include Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Portrait of Joseph Roulin and Irises. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's edition of A Wheatfield with Cypresses was acquired in 1993 for US$57 million.

Romanticised life 

Van Gogh was considered a madman and failure by many of those who knew him, and was dismissed from jobs and alienated from communities for this reason. This view has endured to the present day, but in a different light. Today he is widely romanticised as the quintessential misunderstood genius, the artist for whom "discourses on madness and creativity converge", and whose work often consists of "emotion-fuelled spontaneity". Van Gogh's life, mental health and status as an societal outsider, or "stranger on earth" as described by art historian Judy Sund, has been idealised in many biographies (both art historical and popular), newspaper and magazine articles, speculative medical journal articles, novels, films, album covers and video games.

Several factors have assisted this. His eventful, varied and dramatic life was superficially filled with high and lows. He was highly complex and a mass of contradictions, thus allowing projection by a wide variety of geographically and temporally dispersed view points. His mental difficulties were never diagnosed, do not easily fit into any category and are thus left open. He was an everyman, reinforced by the fact that although highly cultured and well read, he came from a modest family, and although he could live in capital cities such The Hague or Paris and befriend the major modernist painters of the day, he preferred rural settings, sometimes as a pauper. He used only his first name "Vincent" as signature for his paintings and drawings. Although he had love affairs, they were obsessive in nature and none were lasting. He was single, thus available, for most of his years. Solitary by nature, he was highly prolific and industrious, maintaining an exceptional work ethic of over one artwork per day especially in the period before he died.

Van Gogh was very human in his personal failings; he worried about his mental health while living recklessly. He often neglected to eat or sleep properly, usually as a result of drinking to excess. He had a blind spot as to the effect of his presence on others, who were mostly, with reason, hostile. He was deeply interested in the advancement of modernism and adapted its innovations. Yet his paintings are accessible to all; he worked and died before the more alienating non-figurative abstractions of the 1900s and 1910s. Similarly, his choices of colour were often discordant and hallucinatory in individual passages, but canvasses strove for tonal harmony. He considered his art not so much a break from the past as more a line in the continuum; an attractive feature for 20th century tastemakers still interested in broad sweeps of art history.

His letters are expressive and literate, and were described as among the foremost 19th-century writings of their kind. They are extremely open and honest, and allow a rare unguarded and accessible insight into the creative process and mindset.
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