Vincent van Gogh Prints

About Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in Zundert, in the southern Netherlands, and came to painting late. He spent his twenties as an art dealer for Goupil & Cie in The Hague, London and Paris, then as a teacher, a bookseller and a lay preacher in the Belgian coalfields, before deciding in 1880 to become an artist. His training was brief and scattered: lessons in watercolour from Anton Mauve in 1881, a term at the Antwerp academy in 1886, and a few weeks in Fernand Cormon's Paris studio. Paris, where he lived with his brother Theo from 1886 to 1888, changed his palette from the dark earth tones of the Nuenen years to the saturated colour of Impressionism and Japanese prints. In February 1888 he moved to Arles, where he painted the Sunflowers, the Yellow House and the Café Terrace at Night; a year in the asylum at Saint-Rémy followed, then two months at Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died in July 1890 at thirty-seven. In just over a decade he produced about 2,100 works, including some 860 oil paintings, almost all of them in his final four years. The thick, directional brushwork and high-key colour that his contemporaries found crude are exactly what make the paintings carry across a room: they read as pure energy from a distance and as handwriting up close.