Gogh, Vincent Willem new wave ( 1853-1890 ) , Dutch Postimpressionist painter, whose work represents the original of expressionism, the thought of emotional spontaneousness in painting. Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, boy of a Dutch Protestant curate. Early in life he displayed a Moody, ungratified disposition that was to queer his every chase. By the age of 27 he had been in bend a salesman in an art gallery, a Gallic coach, a theological pupil, and an revivalist among the mineworkers at Wasmes in Belgium. His experiences as a sermonizer are reflected in his first pictures of provincials and murphy diggers; of these early plants, the best known is the unsmooth, crude Potato Eaters ( 1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent new wave Gogh, Amsterdam ) . Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early plants grounds new wave Gogh’s intense desire to show the wretchedness and poorness of humanity as he saw it among the mineworkers in Belgium.
In 1886 new wave Gogh went to Paris to populate with his brother Th o new wave Gogh, an art trader, and became familiar with the new art motions developing at the clip. Influenced by the work of the impressionists ( see Impressionism ) and by the work of such Nipponese graphic artists as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques ( see Ukiyo-E ) . Subsequently, he adopted the superb chromaticities found in the pictures of the Gallic creative persons Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.
In 1888 new wave Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the firing Sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the Fieldss, cypress trees, provincials, and countrified life feature of the part. During this period, populating at Arles, he began to utilize the swirling coppice shots and intense yellows, leafy vegetables, and blues associated with such typical plants as Bedroom at Arles ( 1888, Rijksmuseum Vince
nt new wave Gogh ) , and Starry Night ( 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York City ) . For new wave Gogh all seeable phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and religious verve. In his enthusiasm he induced the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had met earlier in Paris, to fall in him. After less than two months they began to hold violent dissensions, climaxing in a wrangle in which new wave Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor; the same dark, in deep compunction, van Gogh cut off portion of his ain ear. For a clip he was in a infirmary at Arles. He so spent a twelvemonth in the nearby refuge of Saint-R my, working between repeated enchantments of lunacy. Under the attention of a sympathetic physician, whose portrayal he painted ( Dr. Gachet,1890, Louvre, Paris ) , van Gogh spent three months at Auvers. Just after finishing his baleful Crows in the Wheat fields ( 1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh ) , he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two years subsequently.
The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother Th O ( published 1911, translated 1958 ) represent a unusually illuminating record of the life of an creative person and a thorough certification of his remarkably fertile end product about 750 pictures and 1600 drawings. The Gallic painter Cha m Soutine, and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, owe more to van Gogh than to any other individual beginning. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent new wave Gogh, incorporating over 1000 pictures, studies, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.
I personally believe that the intense involvement that today’s society has for prevarications non in the quality of his pictures, but in his ability to project his disruptive emotional experience onto the canvas. Because he was an Expressionist, we know more about his mental province than we do ANY other great painter in history.
