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van Gogh Museum

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Van Gogh grew up in a very religious family. (His father was a minister.) As he grew up he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He worked for a while in his uncle's large art dealers' firm. Then he tried teaching school. When he failed the entrance requirements to study for the ministry (he refused to take the Latin exam), he found a job as a missionary to a very poor coal mining town in Belgium. He felt so sorry for the people he worked with that he gave away everything he owned, slept on the floor and ate bread crusts. This extreme behavior caused him to lose his job.

At age 27, Vincent had no idea what he wanted to do. The story would have ended here except for Theo, his brother. Theo had a good job and was able to support Vincent while he painted. Theo was also acquainted with many of the artists in Paris and was able in introduce Vincent to them. Vincent lived in Paris before moving to Aries, an area which reminded him of Japan (he had been impressed by Japanese woodblock prints). In Aries he worked himself to exhaustion. His intensity tended to frighten and alienate people. To relieve his loneliness he invited Paul Gauguin to join him. They argued frequently, and van Gogh cut off his own ear with a razor after one of these disagreements. He checked himself in and out of mental institutions until the day he walked into a field and shot himself.

He loved people and tried to express his emotions through color. He wrote to Theo, "I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say he feels deeply, he feels tenderly."

The colors had meaning to him:

yellow - good, faith, love triumph, hope, friendship; flowers, wheat fields, house

red - warm

blue - spiritual

green - sinister and terrible

These could be changed by altering the value (lightness and darkness), intensity (brightness or dullness), amount (just a touch or cover the canvas), its texture or its combination with other colors.

Van Gogh was 37 when he died. In only ten years he had produced over 1600 works of art. He apparently had sold just one (The Red Vineyard). (Click here for a discussion of this.)  Of the ten highest-priced paintings ever sold, five are by van Gogh.

He had tough Goghing with his life.

Some information taken from "Vincent van Gogh: Working With Color." Scholastic. Art & Man 11:1 (October 1980)