Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, in the Netherlands. He worked for art dealers in The Hague, London, and Paris, taught, and preached among miners in the Borinage before turning fully to drawing and painting in the early 1880s. After time in The Hague, Nuenen, and Antwerp he joined his brother Theo in Paris in 1886 and met Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters. In 1888 he moved to Arles, hoping to found a studio in the south. A crisis that December ended with his hospitalization after he injured his own ear.

He spent 1889–1890 in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, then lodged in Auvers-sur-Oise under Dr. Paul Gachet. He died there on 29 July 1890, two days after a gunshot wound. In a decade he made more than 800 paintings and more than a thousand drawings, including The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, The Bedroom, and The Starry Night, almost none of them sold in his lifetime. Theo’s widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, later organized exhibitions and letters that made him famous. The site’s 12-year cycle reads 30 March 1853 as Ox/Aries.

The still on this page is his own 1889 self-portrait, now in the public domain, not a modern reconstruction.