Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who worked for barely ten years, sold little in his lifetime and died at 37, yet became one of the most famous and influential artists in the world. In a burst of work in the last years of his life, mostly in the south of France, he painted sunflowers, wheat fields, cypresses, starry skies and searching self-portraits in thick, vivid colour that helped open the way to modern art. His letters to his brother Theo are among the great documents of an artist's life.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert, a village in the Catholic province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands, the eldest surviving son of a Protestant pastor, Theodorus van Gogh. A brother, also named Vincent, had been stillborn exactly a year earlier. Of his five younger siblings, the closest to him was Theo, four years younger, who would support him for the rest of his life.

At sixteen he joined the international art dealers Goupil & Cie, where his uncle was a partner, working in The Hague and then from 1873 in London and from 1875 in Paris. He became absorbed in religion, lost interest in selling art and was dismissed in 1876. He then tried teaching at a boarding school in England, working in a bookshop in Dordrecht and studying for the ministry in Amsterdam, which he abandoned.

In 1879 he went as a lay preacher to the Borinage, a coal-mining district of Belgium, where he lived in poverty alongside the miners and gave away his possessions. The church authorities, embarrassed by his zeal, did not renew his post. Out of this crisis, in 1880, aged 27, he decided to become an artist.

Van Gogh was largely self-taught. He studied drawing manuals, copied prints of works by Jean-François Millet, whose peasant subjects he revered, and briefly attended the academy in Brussels. In The Hague in 1881 to 1883 he took lessons from his cousin by marriage, the painter Anton Mauve, until they fell out, partly because Van Gogh had taken in Sien Hoornik, a pregnant former prostitute, and her child. His family was appalled, and he left her in 1883.

After a lonely autumn in the peat country of Drenthe, he moved to his parents' parsonage at Nuenen, where in two years he made nearly two hundred oil paintings of weavers, peasants and the land. The Potato Eaters of 1885, a dark picture of a peasant family eating by lamplight, was his first ambitious work. He wanted it to show people who had, as he put it, tilled the earth with the same hands they were eating with. His father died that year, and after a few months in Antwerp, where he discovered Rubens and Japanese woodblock prints, he went to live with Theo in Paris in 1886.

Paris transformed his art. Through Theo, now a dealer, he saw the work of the Impressionists and met younger painters such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Émile Bernard, Paul Signac and Paul Gauguin. His palette lightened, he adopted shorter brushstrokes influenced by Impressionism and the dotted technique of the Neo-Impressionists, and he collected hundreds of Japanese prints, whose flat colour and bold outlines he imitated. In two years he painted some two hundred pictures, including many self-portraits, as he could not afford models.

In February 1888, tired of city life, he moved to Arles in Provence, in the south of France, hoping to found a community of artists there. The light and colour of the region inspired the most productive period of his life. He painted orchards in blossom, harvest fields, the Café Terrace at Night, the Night Café, his Bedroom and the series of Sunflowers meant to decorate the Yellow House, the four rooms he rented. Colour for him was not just descriptive but expressive, a way to convey emotion: he described trying to show the terrible passions of humanity with red and green.

In October Gauguin joined him, mainly because Theo paid his costs. The two men painted side by side for nine weeks, but argued fiercely. On the evening of 23 December 1888, after a quarrel, Van Gogh cut off all or most of his left ear with a razor and handed it to a young woman at a nearby brothel, now identified as Gabrielle Berlatier, a cleaning maid there. Gauguin left Arles. Van Gogh suffered further attacks of hallucination and confusion, and a petition by neighbours led to his confinement in hospital.

In May 1889 he voluntarily entered the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he stayed a year. Between attacks he painted the asylum garden, olive groves, cypresses and wheat fields, and in June 1889 The Starry Night, the view from his window turned into a swirling night sky over an imagined village. The nature of his illness is still debated; epilepsy, bipolar disorder and other conditions have all been proposed, worsened by poverty, poor diet and heavy drinking.

Recognition was beginning. In January 1890 the critic Albert Aurier published an enthusiastic article about him, and at the exhibition of Les XX in Brussels The Red Vineyard was bought by the painter Anna Boch. The idea that it was the only painting he ever sold is a myth; he made other sales and exchanged many works, though his income remained tiny and he depended on Theo.

In May 1890 he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, under the eye of Dr Paul Gachet, a doctor and amateur artist. In about seventy days he painted some seventy pictures, including Wheatfield with Crows. On 27 July 1890 he shot himself in the chest in the fields, walked back to his inn and died two days later, on 29 July, with Theo at his side. A theory published in 2011 that he was shot accidentally by local boys has attracted attention, but most specialists accept that it was suicide. Theo, already ill, died six months later.

In just over a decade Van Gogh made around 2,100 works, including about 860 oil paintings, most in his last two years. His fame was built after his death, above all by Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who lent his works to exhibitions, sold them carefully and in 1914 published his letters. Retrospectives in Paris and elsewhere in the early twentieth century influenced the Fauves and the German Expressionists; the young Pablo Picasso saw his work at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905.

His use of colour and visible brushwork to express feeling rather than simply record appearances made him a founder of modern painting, alongside Gauguin and Cézanne. His paintings now fetch some of the highest prices ever paid for art. He admired the Dutch masters, especially Rembrandt, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, opened in 1973 around the family collection, is one of the most visited museums in his homeland. The story of the tormented, unrecognised genius has made him a popular myth, which his letters, lucid, well read and deeply self-aware, both feed and correct.