Vincent van Gogh

Dutch Post-Impressionist whose bold color and emotive brushwork shaped virtually every strand of 20th-century painting. Van Gogh came to art late — in his late twenties — after failed attempts at the clergy and the art trade. He was largely self-taught, though he absorbed lessons from his brief time in Antwerp studying Rubens and his longer study of Japanese prints. In a working life of barely a decade he produced more than 2,100 works, including 860 oil paintings, and sold almost none of them. The most transformative years were spent in the south of France, first in Arles where he hoped to found a 'studio of the south' with Gauguin, and then in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. The explosive southern light fed a period of frenzied, visionary productivity. He churned through canvases of cypress trees, olive groves, wheat fields and the starry sky above the hospital garden, each image driven by swirling, physical brushstrokes and colour intensity that go beyond observation into something psychological. He was desperate to capture not what he saw but what he felt about what he saw. He died at thirty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in July 1890, two months after moving to Auvers-sur-Oise under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. His sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger spent decades championing his work and correspondence; the global recognition he never witnessed began within a decade of his death. By the early 20th century, the Expressionists in Germany — Kirchner, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff — had made him their patron saint. His canvases now routinely set world auction records.