Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) was a Dutch painter whose brief and largely commercially unsuccessful career, cut short by his death at thirty seven, produced a body of work, marked by bold color and energetic, visible brushwork, that became enormously influential after his death. Van Gogh began painting seriously only in his late twenties, working first in the darker palette of Dutch and Belgian peasant subjects before moving to Paris in 1886, where exposure to Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting transformed his color and technique. In the final years of his life, spent mostly in the south of France, he produced the paintings for which he is best known today, including The Starry Night, painted in June 1889 while he was a voluntary patient at an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence following a severe mental health crisis. Van Gogh sold very few paintings during his lifetime and depended heavily on financial and emotional support from his brother Theo, whose extensive surviving correspondence with the painter is a major source for understanding his life and working methods. He died in 1890 from a gunshot wound generally understood as self-inflicted, two years before Impressionism's own exhibiting society had fully given way to the more varied styles historians group under Post-Impressionism, the movement with which Van Gogh's mature work is most closely associated.