Who was Vincent van Gogh? His life, art and The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, born in 1853, who took up art at 27, worked for barely ten years, and died in France in 1890 at the age of 37. Who was Vincent van Gogh to his own time? A little-known artist supported by his brother. Today he is one of the most loved painters in history, for works like The Starry Night and the Sunflowers, with their thick paint, strong color and visible, rhythmic brushstrokes.

In short

• In about ten years he made around 2,100 works, including some 860 oil paintings, most of them in his last two years.
• He did sell work in his lifetime, more than the famous "one painting", but he was known only to a small circle of artists when he died.
• His fame was built after his death, above all by his sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who exhibited his work and published his letters.

How did his short career unfold?

Van Gogh came late to art. He worked first for an international firm of art dealers in The Hague, London and Paris, was dismissed in 1876, then tried teaching and preaching, including as a lay missionary among coal miners in Belgium. Only in 1880 did he decide to become an artist. His younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, sent him money every month for the rest of his life, and the more than 600 letters Vincent wrote to Theo are the main record of what he thought and did.

Years	Where	What changed
1853	Zundert, Netherlands	Born 30 March, son of a Protestant minister
1880–1885	Belgium and the Netherlands	Teaches himself to draw; dark pictures of peasants and weavers, ending with The Potato Eaters (1885)
1886–1888	Paris, with Theo	Meets the Impressionists and collects Japanese prints; his palette turns bright, his brushwork broken
February 1888 – May 1889	Arles, southern France	About 200 paintings in 15 months: the Sunflowers, The Bedroom, the Yellow House; Paul Gauguin stays from October to December
May 1889 – May 1890	Saint-Rémy-de-Provence	A voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole: Irises, The Starry Night, cypresses and olive trees
May–July 1890	Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris	About 70 paintings in about 70 days; dies on 29 July, two days after shooting himself

Look at the numbers and a pattern stands out. About 860 oils in ten years would be 86 a year, but they weren't spread evenly: he painted about 200 in 15 months at Arles and roughly one a day at Auvers. Most of the work people know was made in his last two and a half years, in the south of France.

What happened at Arles?

He went south in February 1888 looking for light and color, and hoped to found a "studio of the South" where artists would live and work together. He rented the Yellow House and painted the Sunflowers to decorate the room for Gauguin, who arrived in October. The two painted side by side for nine weeks, and argued. On the evening of 23 December 1888, after a quarrel, Van Gogh cut off his left ear, or part of it, with a razor. He was taken to hospital in what the doctors called an attack of "acute mania", and Gauguin left for Paris. Afterward he had no memory of the night.

How was The Starry Night painted?

The Starry Night is an oil on canvas, 73.7 by 92.1 cm, painted in June 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, and in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941. It is a good painting to read step by step.

1. What he saw. His bedroom faced east over a walled wheat field toward the low Alpilles hills. In early June he wrote to Theo that he had seen the countryside from his window "a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big". That morning star, the planet Venus, is the large white star left of center.
2. Where he painted it. Not at night, and not at the window. He worked by day in a ground-floor room the asylum let him use as a studio, from sketches of a view he painted more than 20 times.
3. What he changed. He added things the window didn't show. The village, with its church spire, is imagined, and the spire looks more Dutch than Provençal. The cypress on the left is far bigger and closer than any tree in his view. The moon is a crescent, though records show it was not at that phase.
4. How the paint works. The paint is thick, laid on in short, directional strokes, so every part of the sky has a direction: the stars throb in rings, the sky rolls like waves. Yellow against deep blue, colors opposite each other on the color wheel, makes both look brighter.
5. What he thought of it. He was unsure. He held it back when he first sent paintings to Theo, and later called it a "failure".

What it adds up to is not a record of a view but a feeling about one: the calm village under a sky in motion. That is the move that made him a forerunner of Expressionism, the art of feeling over appearance.

Did Van Gogh sell only one painting in his life?

No. The famous story is that his only sale was The Red Vineyard, bought in 1890 by the Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of his friend Eugène Boch. According to the Van Gogh Museum, the exact number is unknown, but it was "more than a couple". His uncle Cor, an art dealer, commissioned 19 drawings of The Hague; the Paris paint dealer Julien Tanguy bought from him; Theo sold a work to a London gallery; and he traded paintings with other artists for supplies and food. The truth is less tragic but still hard: he sold little, earned almost nothing from art, and depended on Theo.

He was not unknown, either. In January 1890 the critic Albert Aurier praised him at length in the Mercure de France, and his work was shown in Brussels and Paris in his last two years. Recognition was beginning when he died.

What was his illness?

What is documented is serious. From December 1888 he had repeated attacks with hallucinations, confusion and despair, separated by long periods of clear thinking, in which he wrote lucid letters and painted. He drank heavily, ate poorly and overworked. He chose to enter the asylum, and in its year he had several severe attacks during which he could not work at all.

Still argued

No diagnosis can be made with certainty from letters and doctors' notes more than 130 years old. His own doctors in Arles and Saint-Rémy spoke of a form of epilepsy. Later writers have proposed bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, acute intermittent porphyria and the effects of alcohol, and some combine them. Scholars broadly agree only that his condition came in episodes. The popular idea that his illness produced his art has little support: he painted between attacks, not during them, and his letters show a careful, reflective craftsman.

How did he become famous after his death?

Theo died in January 1891, six months after Vincent, and left everything to his widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, then 28, with a baby son and hundreds of paintings and drawings. As the Van Gogh Museum puts it, she sold some, loaned others to exhibitions, and published his letters. She placed works with dealers and collectors, organized a large retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1905, and in 1914 published most of the letters to Theo, which gave the world his story in his own words. Within a generation, the young painters of Fauvism and German Expressionism were taking up his color and brushwork, and his name was everywhere.

His fame since has its own momentum, as with the Mona Lisa: auction records, films, posters and immersive shows. But it rests on something the paintings do that doesn't need a story, which is to make color and paint carry feeling directly. Two decades later, Pablo Picasso would push the break with appearances much further. For the larger question of what painting is for, see what art is.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name three places Van Gogh lived as a painter, and what changed in his work in each.
• What did he see from his window, and what did he add or change, in The Starry Night?
• Why is "he sold only one painting" wrong, and what role did Jo van Gogh-Bonger play?

Sources

• How many paintings did Vincent sell during his lifetime? — Van Gogh Museum
• How did Vincent van Gogh become famous after his death? — Van Gogh Museum
• Why did Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear? — Van Gogh Museum
• Vincent van Gogh — Wikipedia
• The Starry Night — Wikipedia