Search results
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ vɑŋ ˈɣɔx] ⓘ; [ note 1 ] 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most ...
- Overview
- Early life
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, generally considered to be the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. He sold only one artwork during his life, but in the century after his death he became perhaps the most recognized painter of all time.
What did Vincent van Gogh accomplish?
During his 10-year artistic career, Vincent van Gogh created a vivid personal style, noted for its striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms. His achievement is all the more remarkable for the brevity of his career and considering the poverty and mental illness that dogged him.
What were Vincent van Gogh’s jobs?
Vincent van Gogh’s career as an artist was extremely short, lasting only the 10 years from 1880 to 1890. Before that he had various occupations, including art dealer, language teacher, lay preacher, bookseller, and missionary worker.
How was Vincent van Gogh influential?
Van Gogh, the eldest of six children of a Protestant pastor, was born and reared in a small village in the Brabant region of the southern Netherlands. He was a quiet, self-contained youth, spending his free time wandering the countryside to observe nature. At 16 he was apprenticed to The Hague branch of the art dealers Goupil and Co., of which his uncle was a partner.
Van Gogh worked for Goupil in London from 1873 to May 1875 and in Paris from that date until April 1876. Daily contact with works of art aroused his artistic sensibility, and he soon formed a taste for Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and other Dutch masters, although his preference was for two contemporary French painters, Jean-François Millet and Camille Corot, whose influence was to last throughout his life. Van Gogh disliked art dealing. Moreover, his approach to life darkened when his love was rejected by a London girl in 1874. His burning desire for human affection thwarted, he became increasingly solitary. He worked as a language teacher and lay preacher in England and, in 1877, worked for a bookseller in Dordrecht, Netherlands. Impelled by a longing to serve humanity, he envisaged entering the ministry and took up theology; however, he abandoned this project in 1878 for short-term training as an evangelist in Brussels. A conflict with authority ensued when he disputed the orthodox doctrinal approach. Failing to get an appointment after three months, he left to do missionary work among the impoverished population of the Borinage, a coal-mining region in southwestern Belgium. There, in the winter of 1879–80, he experienced the first great spiritual crisis of his life. Living among the poor, he gave away all his worldly goods in an impassioned moment; he was thereupon dismissed by church authorities for a too-literal interpretation of Christian teaching.
Penniless and feeling that his faith was destroyed, he sank into despair and withdrew from everyone. “They think I’m a madman,” he told an acquaintance, “because I wanted to be a true Christian. They turned me out like a dog, saying that I was causing a scandal.” It was then that van Gogh began to draw seriously, thereby discovering in 1880 his true vocation as an artist. Van Gogh decided that his mission from then on would be to bring consolation to humanity through art. “I want to give the wretched a brotherly message,” he explained to his brother Theo. “When I sign [my paintings] ‘Vincent,’ it is as one of them.” This realization of his creative powers restored his self-confidence.
Britannica Quiz
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Vincent van Gogh. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was born into a minister’s family in Zundert in the province of Brabant. After a brief stint in the art trade he initially wanted to become a ‘painter of peasants.’. In the mere ten years that his painting career spanned, his quest for colour, light and the representation of his personal ...
Vincent was the only child of Theo van Gogh and Jo Bonger. He was born in Paris on 31 January 1890 and named after his artist uncle. He studied mechanical engineering at Delft University and worked as an engineer in France, the United States and Japan, before returning to the Netherlands in early 1920. Together with Ernst Hijmans, a friend from ...
Apr 3, 2014 · Some of van Gogh's most famous works include "Starry Night," "Irises," and "Sunflowers." In a moment of instability, Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and offered it to a prostitute. Van Gogh died ...
Vincent Van Gogh was born the second of six children into a religious Dutch Reformed Church family in the south of the Netherlands. His father, Theodorus Van Gogh, was a clergyman and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was the daughter of a bookseller.
People also ask
Is Van Gogh a Dutch name?
Who was Vincent van Gogh?
Was Vincent van Gogh a good painter?
Who were Vincent van Gogh parents?
Why is Vincent van Gogh so popular?
Did Van Gogh like art?
Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ vɑŋ ˈɣɔx]; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. 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.
