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Vincent Van Goghs |
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Vincent Van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, Netherlands. The Dutch painter made several famous works of art before he died on 29 July 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. He was just 37 when he died the unfortunate death. Post-Impressionist artists, Vincent Van Gogh made some of the world’s best known paintings and drawings and they were also some of the most expensive ones. His career started as a teacher, and then he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region.
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It was not until 1880 that he started his career as an artist and worked under a firm of art dealers. In his initial works, Vincent Van Gogh worked only with somber colors until he came across Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism art in Paris. He developed his own unique style and incorporated bright colors in his paintings. In his ten years as an artist, his most significant achievements were done in his last two years of his career and life. He died a tragic death by committing suicide after a mental breakdown. By then he had already produced more than 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings.
On March 1885, his first major work, The Potato Eaters, was displayed in an art gallery for the first time in Paris. Following spite over the selling of his paintings, his brother Theo suggested that his paintings were too dark and not in line with the current style of bright Impressionist paintings. Vincent Van Gough then moved to Antwerpen living on bread, coffee and tobacco while spending all his money on materials for his paintings and models. It was here that he stated drinking absinthe heavily. In January 1886 he matriculated at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Antwerpen, studying paintings and drawings. He then moved in with his brother in Paris and there is much lesser information about him as there was no need to communicate with letters anymore. He studied at Fernand Cormon’s studio and viewed works by Paul Cezanne.
Some of his most famous works of Van Gogh are The Potato Eaters, Skull with a Burning cigarette, Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, The Red Vineyard, The Starry Night, Portrait of Dr. Gachet which was sold for 82.5 million US dollars, The Church at Auvers and Wheat Field with Crows. Since his first exhibits in the late 1880s, Vincent Van Gogh had grown steadily with his career as an artist and started to be recognized among his colleagues and among art critics, dealers and collectors. After his death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. The exhibitions were followed by vast retrospectives during the early twentieth century in Paris (1901 and 1905), Amsterdam (1905), Cologne (1912), New York City (1913) and Berlin (1914). These had a vast influence over the new generation artists. The French Fauves, including the famous artist Henri Matisse, applied Vincent Van Gogh's style of coloring and so did the German Expressionists in the Die Brücke group. The 1950s' Abstract Expressionism is seen as benefiting from the exploration Van Gogh started with gesture marks. In 1957, Anglo-Irish artist Francis Bacon made several paintings on reproductions of Van Gogh's The Painter on his Way to Work. Unfortunately, these were destroyed during World War II.
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