The Starry Night. Vincent van Gogh · Public domain · source

Vincent van Gogh

Public domain1853-1890·Dutch·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Dutch painter who produced almost all of his roughly 2,100 works, including some 860 oil paintings, in the last decade of his life. Worked in the Netherlands, Paris, Arles, Saint-Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise, and died at 37.

Why they matter

The thick impasto, the heightened colour and the visible, directional brushwork made him the bridge from Impressionism to Expressionism. He is also the most reproduced painter alive or dead, which is exactly why a good print is easy to find and a bad one is easier.

What to buy

Prints: the Van Gogh Museum shop sells reproductions made from its own high-resolution photography of the actual paintings, which is the best source there is. Amazon and eBay listings are overwhelmingly generic poster stock; search by painting title, not just the name. Books: the Taschen complete-works volume is the standard affordable monograph. The letters, edited by the Van Gogh Museum, are the best primary source on any painter ever published. Originals: no. Drawings and letters surface only at major auction houses.

Notes

The Van Gogh Museum and the Kroller-Muller Museum (Otterlo) hold the two largest collections. Essentially every painting is public domain and available at high resolution from the museum sites and Wikimedia Commons.

Story

Van Gogh sold very few paintings in his lifetime - the one documented sale is The Red Vineyard, bought by Anna Boch in Brussels in 1890 for 400 francs. Almost everything we know about his thinking comes from the roughly 800 surviving letters, most of them to his brother Theo, an art dealer who supported him financially for years. Theo died six months after Vincent. It was Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who inherited hundreds of unsold canvases and the letters, and who spent the next three decades organising exhibitions and publishing the correspondence. The reputation was largely her work. The family's collection eventually became the core of the Van Gogh Museum, which opened in Amsterdam in 1973.

Key works

The Starry Night (1889) - MoMA, New York
Sunflowers (1888) - National Gallery, London (one of several versions)
The Bedroom (1888) - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (first version)
Almond Blossom (1890) - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Wheatfield with Crows (1890) - Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Vincent van Gogh

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also