Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a village in the Netherlands. He died at Auvers-sur-Oise, France, on July 29, 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 painted The Starry Night, which hangs at MoMA in New York, and the Sunflowers, one version of which is at the National Gallery in London. Almost every famous picture comes from after February 1888, when he stepped off a train in Arles.
The fame came after his death. While he lived he sold almost nothing, and even the count of 2,100 has a catch: it includes drawings and watercolors, and he destroyed several large early canvases himself.
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Vincent was the son of a Protestant pastor, and nothing in his childhood pointed to a painter. Art entered his life through an uncle.
In 1869 his uncle Vincent, a partner in Goupil, a firm that sold paintings and prints, found him a job as a clerk in its branch in The Hague.
Goupil later sent him to London, then to Paris. He came to dislike selling pictures as merchandise and turned more and more to religion, and in March 1876 the firm let him go.
He then tried to become a minister. He failed the entrance exam for theology in Amsterdam, then a missionary course near Brussels. The church still gave him a post, and by January 1879, aged 25, he was preaching to coal miners in Belgium.
Among the miners
In Petit-Wasmes, a mining village of the Borinage, in southern Belgium near the French border, Van Gogh gave his lodgings at a bakery to a homeless person and moved into a hut, where he slept on straw…
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