Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh's unique vision, brushwork and use of color provide stylistic links from Impressionism to the conceptual practice of Abstract Expressionism. Although he produced his most acclaimed work in a span of less than three years, his technique, subject matter, sense of movement and vibration in his compositions influenced many artists of his day and of the future. His gestural use of line and distortion of reality for emotional effect became a guiding principle for the Abstract Expressionist artists of the New York School.

• Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a unique fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases.
• His personal temperament came to symbolize the romantic image of the tortured artist and was an icon of self-destructive talent that would be echoed in the lives of many artists in the 20th century and beyond.
• Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define Abstract Expressionism.

Vincent van Gogh was born the second of six children into a religious Dutch Reformed Christian family. His father, Theodorus van Gogh, was a clergyman and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was the daughter of a bookseller. Van Gogh exhibited unstable moods during his childhood, and showed no early inclination toward art making, though he excelled at languages while attending two boarding schools. He left formal schooling at fifteen and the following year moved to Paris.

In 1869, Van Gogh apprenticed at the headquarters of Goupil & Cie, international art dealers. Van Gogh was transferred to several offices of Goupil & Cie, in Brussels, where he studied anatomical and perspective drawing, and at The Hague. In 1873, Van Gogh moved to the London office and, despite his daily contact with artists and works of art, he became depressed and turned to God. He attended exhibitions and decorated his rooms with his favorite works, but continued to feel lost. After many further transfers, he was let go from his position and became a clergyman. In 1880, Van Gogh decided he could be an artist and still remain in God's service, writing, "To try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another, in a picture."

A year later, in 1881, dire poverty motivated him to move back home with his parents, where he taught himself to draw. Trying to master perspective, shading, and anatomy, he experimented with numerous methods and styles, depicting a variety of subjects. With the support of his brother, Theo, Van Gogh studied under Anton Mauve, a leading member of The Hague School who was also a cousin of Van Gogh's mother. During his time with Mauve, in 1882, Van Gogh drew urban workers and the poor, influenced by Jean-Francois Millet, who was renowned for depicting these themes.

In 1884, Van Gogh began drawing weathered hands, heads and other anatomical features. Due to the extreme religiosity of his family, certain actions by Van Gogh created untenable rifts; specifically, Van Gogh's continued pursuit of his cousin, who rebuffed his advances, split the family apart. Additionally, Van Gogh accused Theo of not trying hard enough to sell his paintings, to which Theo replied that Vincent's dark palette was out of vogue and the current Parisian style of the Impressionist artists was bright and bold.

Suddenly, on March 26, 1885, Vincent's father died from a stroke and shortly afterward, Van Gogh completed the Potato Eaters, his first large-scale composition and first great work.

Van Gogh enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp where he discovered the art of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens as well as artwork by various Japanese artists. However, the rigidity of academicism did not appeal to him and he left for Paris where, in 1886, he moved in with Theo.

In Paris, Van Gogh studied with painter Fernand Cormon, who ushered Van Gogh into the Impressionist circle. The influence of artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, and Georges Seurat, as well as pressure from his brother and the need to sell paintings, motivated him to move toward a lighter palette.

Van Gogh experimented with Impressionist techniques, seeking to objectively record nature through the fugitive effects of color and light. While admitting his debt to the pure, brilliant colors of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken color, Van Gogh sought a more emotionally expressive mode of painting, and became known as a "Post-Impressionist," an artist emerging from the shadow of Impressionism to expand the more limited aims of the optically-experimental, pastoral style.

In his own work, Van Gogh distorted and exaggerated forms to express his emotional turmoil, eventually evolving a highly individual style. From 1886-88, he became acutely interested in Japanese prints, encouraging his friends to collect them. He became closer to the Paris avant-garde in January of 1887 through his time spent at Pere Tanguy's art shop, an informal gathering place for painters, mostly Cubists and Futurists. He began making portraits, including self-portraits and still lifes of flowers, working to improve his use of color. In late 1887, Van Gogh exhibited his own work at an exhibition that included colleagues Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and organized two exhibitions of Japanese prints. At the beginning of 1888, Van Gogh exhibited work with Neo-Impressionists Seurat and Signac at the Salle de Repetition of the Theatre Libre d'Antoine. Theo also arranged for an exhibition of Van Gogh's paintings at an important exhibition of the Artistes Independents in Paris.

During the fall and winter of 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin lived and worked together in Provence. The relationship began as a plan for a new community of artists and came at a critical point in each of the artists' careers. Their creativity was stimulated by association as both entered into an enormously productive period. They worked closely together and developed the conception of color as not necessarily reflective of nature, but rather as symbolic of inner emotion. Despite his enormous productivity, Van Gogh suffered from various types of epilepsy, psychotic attacks, delusions and most likely a bipolar disorder. Gauguin left for Tahiti partially as a means of escaping Van Gogh's increasingly erratic behavior.

Most of Van Gogh's best works were produced during the final two years of his life. On May 8, 1889, reeling from his deteriorating mental condition, Van Gogh committed himself into a mental institution. As the weeks passed, his mental well-being remained stable and he was allowed to resume painting; in the ten weeks spent under doctors' care, he created over 100 works, including Church at Auvers. The clinic and its garden became his main subject, all rendered in the style of swirling patterns typified by his famous canvas, Starry Night. On supervised walks, Van Gogh immersed himself in the experience of the natural surrounds, later capturing the forms of olive and cypress trees on canvas. Shortly after leaving the clinic, Van Gogh's depression worsened and he shot himself in the chest with a revolver, dying two days later.

Van Gogh's renown steadily increased after his death, and his revolutionary approach to painting had a strong influence on the next generation of artists. The Fauves and the German Expressionists adopted both Van Gogh's use of color and gestural style, and later Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and de Kooning made use of Van Gogh's experimental technique of sweeping, expressive brush strokes. He demonstrated that painting was not merely a study of the visible world, but also an expression of the artist's emotional response to his surroundings. His life of mental illness and instability created an image of a tortured soul who later captured the imagination of the world. His art and life have also inspired numerous films, as well as classical and popular music. Van Gogh painted 900 paintings and made 1,100 drawings and sketches, while only selling one of them in his career. Sharply contrasting his lifetime of poverty, Van Gogh's paintings have now sold for tens of millions of dollars and are some of the most rare and sought after acquisitions in the art market.


Below are Vincent van Gogh's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.


"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures"

"Dying is hard, but living is harder still."

"I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones."

"Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully."