Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh painted for ten years, sold almost nothing, and became the most widely recognised painter in the world. Born in Zundert in the Netherlands in 1853, the son of a pastor, he worked as an art dealer, a teacher and a bookshop clerk before training for the ministry and going as an unpaid missionary to the Borinage coalfield in Belgium, where he gave away his possessions and was dismissed for excessive zeal. He began drawing seriously at twenty-seven. His early Dutch work is dark and heavy, and culminates in The Potato Eaters of 1885, painted in earth colours to show peasants who had, as he put it, dug the earth with the same hands they put in the dish. He moved to Paris in 1886, lived with his brother Theo, an art dealer who supported him financially throughout, and encountered Impressionism and Japanese prints. His palette changed completely within two years. In February 1888 he went to Arles seeking stronger light, and produced the sunflowers, the yellow house, the night café and the orchards at extraordinary speed. Paul Gauguin joined him that October in the hope of founding an artists' colony; after nine weeks of arguments Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear. He committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy in 1889, where he painted the Starry Night and the olive groves through a barred window, and worked in the intervals between attacks. He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890, produced some seventy canvases in seventy days, and shot himself in the chest in July, dying two days later at thirty-seven. Theo died six months afterwards.

• Lived: 1853 CE – 1890 CE
• Nationality: Dutch
• Roles: painter