Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose roughly 2,100 artworks — almost all created in the final decade of his short life — made him one of the most-influential figures in Western art history. He was born Vincent Willem van Gogh on March 30, 1853, in the Dutch village of Zundert, the eldest surviving son of a Dutch Reformed minister. He worked as an art dealer, schoolteacher, and lay preacher in his twenties before deciding at age 27 to become a painter.

His painting career lasted only about ten years, from 1880 until his death in 1890. The early Dutch period (1880–1885) produced dark, earthy peasant-subject paintings — the most famous being The Potato Eaters (1885). After moving to Paris in 1886, his palette brightened dramatically under the influence of the French Impressionists and the Japanese woodblock prints he and his brother Theo collected. The southern French period in Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (1888–1890) was his most-productive — about 200 paintings in two years, including most of his most-iconic works: Sunflowers (1888), The Bedroom (1888), Starry Night (1889, painted from his asylum window in Saint-Rémy), The Yellow House, and his final Wheatfield with Crows (1890).

Van Gogh struggled throughout his adult life with severe mental illness — modern diagnoses have variously suggested epilepsy, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and absinthe-related neurological damage. The incident in which he severed part of his own left ear during a December 1888 mental breakdown in Arles led to his voluntary admission to the Saint-Rémy asylum, where he continued painting prolifically.

He sold only one painting during his lifetime (The Red Vineyard, 1890) and was financially supported entirely by his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris. The over 600 letters between Vincent and Theo are one of the most-celebrated artist-correspondence archives in art history. On July 27, 1890, Vincent shot himself in a wheat field outside Auvers-sur-Oise, France; he died two days later on July 29, 1890, at age 37. His paintings are now among the most-valuable artworks in the world — a Van Gogh portrait sold at auction in 1990 for $82.5 million, the highest auction price for a painting at that time.

His name Vincent is from the Latin Vincentius meaning "conquering" — anchored in Catholic tradition through Saint Vincent de Paul. Vincent has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.