Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, born in 1853, who died in France in 1890 at 37. In about ten years he made roughly 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in his last two years. He sold almost nothing while he lived. Today The Starry Night hangs at MoMA in New York and a Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London.
That count has a catch. The 2,100 includes drawings and watercolors, and he destroyed several large early canvases himself. Almost every famous picture comes from after February 1888, when he stepped off a train in Arles.
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In Arles, between February 1888 and May 1889, he completed 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolors. That is a canvas every two or three days for fifteen months.
Then came Auvers. He reached the village north of Paris in May 1890, and in the roughly seventy days he had left he painted about seventy oils. A church, wheat fields, the portrait of his doctor.
Almost none of it sold. Only one painting is known by name to have been bought while he was alive, for 400 francs, a few months before he died. The rest piled up in a Paris apartment, where a young widow with a baby had to decide what to do with them.
What You'll Discover
Why a failed preacher picked up a pencil.
What Paris did to his colors.
What happened in the Yellow House.
What he painted behind asylum bars.
How the last seventy days ended.
Who made him famous after all.