Van Gogh
born: 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890
Biography:
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda in the Province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. n July 1869, at the age of fifteen, Vincent obtained a position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague through his Uncle Vincent ("Cent"), who had built up a good business which became a branch of the firm. After his training, Goupil transferred him to London in June 1873, where he lodged at 87 Hackford Road, Brixton[5] and worked at Messrs. Goupil & Co., 17 Southampton Street.[6] This was a happy time for Vincent, and one of the few in his life: he was successful at work, and was already, at the age of 20, earning more than his father. He fell in love with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but when he finally confessed his feeling to her, she rejected him, saying that she was already secretly engaged to a previous lodger. Vincent became increasingly isolated and fervent about religion. His father and uncle sent him to Paris, where he became resentful at how art was treated as a commodity, and he manifested this to the customers. On 1 April 1876, it was agreed that his employment should be terminated.
n March of 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris to study at Cormon's studio, and in May of 1886 his mother and sister Wil moved to Breda.[52] The brothers first shared Theo's Rue Laval apartment on Montmartre. In June, they took a larger flat at 54 Rue Lepic, further uphill. As there was no longer the need to communicate by letters, less is known about Van Gogh's time in Paris than earlier or later periods of his life. For some months he worked at Cormon's studio where he frequented the circle of the British-Australian artist John Peter Russell, and met fellow students like Émile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who used to meet at the paint store run by Julien "Père" Tanguy, which was at that time the only place to view works by Paul Cézanne.
t was not difficult to see and study Impressionist works in Paris at this time. In 1886, for example, two large vanguard exhibitions were staged, the 8th and final exhibition of the Impressionists and an exhibition of the Artistes Indépendants. In these shows Neo-Impressionism made its first appearance; works of Georges Seurat, the master of the pointillist style, and Paul Signac were the talk of the town. Though Theo, too, kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on Boulevard Montmarte, by artists including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, Vincent evidently had problems acknowledging these recent ways to see and paint. Conflicts arose, and at the turn of 1886 to 1887 Theo found shared life with Vincent "almost unbearable," but in the spring of 1887 they made peace. Then Vincent set out for a campaign in Asnières, where he became personally acquainted with Paul Signac. Vincent and his friend Emile Bernard, who lived with parents in Asnières, adopted elements of the "pointillé", or pointillism, style, where many small dots are applied to the canvas, resulting in an optical blend of hues, when seen from a distance. The theory behind this also stresses the value of complementary colours in proximity—for example, blue and orange—as such pairings enhance the brilliance of each colour by a physical effect (known as optical mixing) on the receptors in the eye.
Van Gogh's depression deepened, and on 27 July 1890, at the age of 37, he walked into the fields with his art supplies. He was carrying a revolver. Whatever else may be thought about his motives, what he did next is usually recognised as a deliberate choice on his part. He shot himself in the chest with the gun. Without fully realizing that he was fatally wounded, he returned to the Ravoux Inn. There, he died in his bed two days later, on 29 July 1890. Theo hastened to be at his side and reported his last words as, "La tristesse durera toujours," which is French for "The sadness will last forever." Vincent was buried at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise.[67]
Theo had contracted syphilis (though this was not admitted by the family for many years) and, not long after Vincent's death, was himself admitted to hospital. He never succeeded in coming to terms with the grief of his brother's absence, and died six months later, on 25 January, at Utrecht. In 1914 Theo's body was exhumed and re-buried beside Vincent.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, a village close to Breda in the Province of North Brabant in the southern Netherlands. n July 1869, at the age of fifteen, Vincent obtained a position with the art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague through his Uncle Vincent ("Cent"), who had built up a good business which became a branch of the firm. After his training, Goupil transferred him to London in June 1873, where he lodged at 87 Hackford Road, Brixton[5] and worked at Messrs. Goupil & Co., 17 Southampton Street.[6] This was a happy time for Vincent, and one of the few in his life: he was successful at work, and was already, at the age of 20, earning more than his father. He fell in love with his landlady's daughter, Eugénie Loyer, but when he finally confessed his feeling to her, she rejected him, saying that she was already secretly engaged to a previous lodger. Vincent became increasingly isolated and fervent about religion. His father and uncle sent him to Paris, where he became resentful at how art was treated as a commodity, and he manifested this to the customers. On 1 April 1876, it was agreed that his employment should be terminated.
n March of 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris to study at Cormon's studio, and in May of 1886 his mother and sister Wil moved to Breda.[52] The brothers first shared Theo's Rue Laval apartment on Montmartre. In June, they took a larger flat at 54 Rue Lepic, further uphill. As there was no longer the need to communicate by letters, less is known about Van Gogh's time in Paris than earlier or later periods of his life. For some months he worked at Cormon's studio where he frequented the circle of the British-Australian artist John Peter Russell, and met fellow students like Émile Bernard and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who used to meet at the paint store run by Julien "Père" Tanguy, which was at that time the only place to view works by Paul Cézanne.
t was not difficult to see and study Impressionist works in Paris at this time. In 1886, for example, two large vanguard exhibitions were staged, the 8th and final exhibition of the Impressionists and an exhibition of the Artistes Indépendants. In these shows Neo-Impressionism made its first appearance; works of Georges Seurat, the master of the pointillist style, and Paul Signac were the talk of the town. Though Theo, too, kept a stock of Impressionist paintings in his gallery on Boulevard Montmarte, by artists including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, Vincent evidently had problems acknowledging these recent ways to see and paint. Conflicts arose, and at the turn of 1886 to 1887 Theo found shared life with Vincent "almost unbearable," but in the spring of 1887 they made peace. Then Vincent set out for a campaign in Asnières, where he became personally acquainted with Paul Signac. Vincent and his friend Emile Bernard, who lived with parents in Asnières, adopted elements of the "pointillé", or pointillism, style, where many small dots are applied to the canvas, resulting in an optical blend of hues, when seen from a distance. The theory behind this also stresses the value of complementary colours in proximity—for example, blue and orange—as such pairings enhance the brilliance of each colour by a physical effect (known as optical mixing) on the receptors in the eye.
Van Gogh's depression deepened, and on 27 July 1890, at the age of 37, he walked into the fields with his art supplies. He was carrying a revolver. Whatever else may be thought about his motives, what he did next is usually recognised as a deliberate choice on his part. He shot himself in the chest with the gun. Without fully realizing that he was fatally wounded, he returned to the Ravoux Inn. There, he died in his bed two days later, on 29 July 1890. Theo hastened to be at his side and reported his last words as, "La tristesse durera toujours," which is French for "The sadness will last forever." Vincent was buried at the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise.[67]
Theo had contracted syphilis (though this was not admitted by the family for many years) and, not long after Vincent's death, was himself admitted to hospital. He never succeeded in coming to terms with the grief of his brother's absence, and died six months later, on 25 January, at Utrecht. In 1914 Theo's body was exhumed and re-buried beside Vincent.
painting gallery
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his work:
an Gogh drew and painted water-colours while he went to school, though very few of these works survive, and his authorship is challenged for many claimed to be from this period. When he committed himself to art as an adult in 1880, he started at the elementary level by copying the "Cours de dessin," edited by Charles Bargue and published by Goupil & Cie. Within his first two years, he began to seek commissions, and in spring 1882, his uncle, Cornelis Marinus, owner of a renowned gallery of contemporary art in Amsterdam, asked him to provide drawings of the Hague; Van Gogh's work did not prove up to his uncle's expectations. Despite this, Uncle Cor (or "C.M. " as he was referred to by his nephews) offered a second commission, specifying the subject matter in detail, but he was once again disappointed with the result.
Nevertheless, Van Gogh persevered with his work. He improved the lighting of his atelier (studio) by installing variable shutters, and experimented with a variety of drawing materials. For more than a year he worked hard on single figures--highly elaborated studies in "black and white," which at the time gained him only criticism. Nowadays they are appreciated as his first masterpieces. In the spring of 1883, he embarked on multi-figure compositions, based on the drawings. He had some of them photographed, but when his brother commented that they lacked liveliness and freshness, Vincent destroyed them and turned to oil painting.
Already in the autumn of 1882, Theo had enabled him to do his first paintings, but the amount Theo could supply was soon spent. Then, in the spring of 1883, Vincent 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 Hague School artists of the second generation. When he moved to Nuenen, after the intermezzo in Drenthe, he started various large size paintings, but he destroyed most of them himself. The Potato Eaters and its companion pieces, The Old Tower on the Nuenen cemetery and The Cottage, are the only ones that have survived. A visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, made Vincent aware that many faults of his paintings were due to a lack of technical experience. So he went to Antwerp, and later to Paris, to improve his technical skill.
More or less acquainted with impressionist and neo-impressionist techniques and theories, Van Gogh went to Arles to develop these new possibilities. But within a short time, older ideas on art and work reappeared: ideas like doing series on related or contrasting subject matter, which would reflect the purpose of art. Already in 1884 in Nuenen he had worked on a series that was to decorate the dining room of a friend in Eindhoven. Similarly in Arles, in spring 1888 he arranged his Flowering Orchards into triptychs, began a series of figures which found its end in The Roulin Family, and finally, when Gauguin had consented to work and live in Arles side by side with Vincent, he started to work on the The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Most of his later work is elaborating or revising its fundamental settings.
The paintings from the Saint-Rémy period are often characterized by swirls and spirals. The patterns of luminosity in these images have been shown[74] to conform to Kolmogorov's statistical model of turbulence. At various times in his life Van Gogh painted the view from his window; this culminated in the great series of paintings of the wheat field he could see from his adjoining cells in the asylum at Saint-Rémy