Vincent van Gogh

Dutch Post-Impressionist whose bold color and emotive brushwork shaped 20th-century art. Van Gogh came to painting late, in his late twenties, after failed attempts at the clergy and the art trade. In a working life of barely a decade he produced more than 2,100 works — landscapes, portraits, self-portraits, sunflowers — and sold almost none of them. The breakthrough years were spent in the south of France, in Arles and then in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he chased the southern light and the cypress trees through bouts of severe mental illness. He died at thirty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, two months after writing to his brother Theo that he was painting 'with the calm of a brush stroke.' His sister-in-law Jo van Gogh-Bonger spent the rest of her life championing his work; the global recognition he never saw began in earnest within a decade of his death.