A Very Brief Biography of Vincent Van Gogh

“I want to paint what I feel, and feel what I paint”-Vincent Willem Van Gogh. He grew up in a religious and cultured environment, being raised by a pastor and was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. His mother was an artist whose love of drawing and watercolors were transferred to her son. Van Gogh was born on the exact same date that his brother, also named Vincent, died. At a young age, his name and birthdate were already etched on his dead brother's headstone, and might explain for his emotional state.

At age 15, van Gogh's family couldn’t support him so he left school and got a job at an art dealership in The Hague where he started his career as a picture salesman. Van Gogh was then transferred to a firm in London. After one of his lovers rejected him, he went through a breakdown. He became mad with customers and co-workers and devoted his life to God. Van Gogh then taught at a school, and also preached to the parishioners. Hoping to one day be like his father, he prepared to take an entrance exam to a School of Theology, but he was denied entrance. Then, Van Gogh volunteered to move to a coal mine in southern Belgium. He preached and ministered, and also drew pictures of the miners and their families. The church became infuriated and it was required of him to find another profession.

Van Gogh was aimless until he decided to move to Brussels and take up the practice of art at the age of 27. Though he had no formal art training, his younger brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially. Largely self-taught, Van Gogh started as an artist by copying prints and studying drawing manuals and lesson books. He had many reasons for drawing. At the beginning of his line of work, he found it essential to master black a...

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...lthough most of them are destroyed or lost. Van Gogh’s art is aligned with the growing Symbolist movement and highlighting the originality and intensity of his artistic vision. Van Gogh’s work, notable for its beauty, emotion and color, highly impacted 20th century art. Fortunately, his mother lived long enough to see her son hailed as an artist and a genius. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely engaged in the effort to explain his struggle against madness or his understanding of the spiritual essence of man and nature. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned with brushstroke, color, in surface tension, and in form and line. If only he was able to live longer to create even more ingenious creations.