Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, a village in the south of the Netherlands. His father was the protestant minister of the place, but three of his father's brothers were art dealers, and so it is only natural that Vincent became an apprentice at the shop of his uncle Vincent van Gogh in The Hague. His uncle had become a partner in the firm of Goupil & Cie, and after having worked in The Hague for four years Vincent was sent to other branches of the Goupil firm, first in London, then in Paris.

During the years in London and Paris, Vincent had developed an intense love for the Church and a desire to follow in the footsteps of his father. In England he found a job as a schoolmaster. Back in Holland, he finally got permission from his father and his influential uncles to start the long study to become a clergyman. From 1877 to 1878, he stayed in the house of his uncle Jan, a high-ranking naval officer in Amsterdam, taking lessons in Latin and Greek and mathematics in order to prepare himself for the entrance examination of the University, but that kind of study soon became too much for him; he wanted to bring his religious ideas into practice as soon as possible, and finally, with the reluctant help of his father, he found a job as an evangelist in a poor mining district in Belgium, the Borinage. Here, he could live up to his ideals, and his first letters from the Borinage show that he liked his work. He gave Bible classes, taught the children of the miners, and did his utmost to help the poor, the sick, and the wounded. He gave away his best clothes and for some time lived in a miserable hut. His fanaticism was probably the cause that after six months the Evangelisation Committee did not renew his appointment. For some time he tried to go on with his social work, living on the little money his father sent him, but at the same time his interest had shifted to art again and he became more preoccupied with his drawing than with the Church. In April 1881, after a year of struggling with himself in poverty and isolation, he returned to the home of his parents, who had by now settled in Etten, another village in the province of Brabant, and it was here that his career as a professional artist really begun.
Although for more than a year Van Gogh had been making drawings of m...

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... for a few long periods of illness, he could, and the result was an astoundingly copious production of important drawings and paintings, including such famous masterpieces as The Irises, the expressionistic Starry Night, and the Self-Portrait on a Light Background. The last two and a half months of his life he spent at Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, where we see the last outburst of his creativity with some 60 paintings, among them such famous pictures as the one of the village church against a deep blue sky, the two portraits of Doctor Gachet, and the highly dramatic and symbolic Wheatfield with Crows. He was 37 when he shot himself on July 27, and died on July 29, 1890.
Van Gogh's paintings are scattered all over the world, but the two largest collections of his works are still in his native Holland, one in the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the other in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo near Arnhem. Theo, who had supported Vincent morally and financially during his whole life as an artist, became insane shortly after his brother's death, and died a few months later, himself only 33 years old. Their graves are side by side near the old church at Auvers-sur-Oise.