Vincent Van Gogh the Bold Painter

Vincent Van Gogh The Bold Painter The beautiful painting, Starry Night is the most popular, well known, and one of my favorite paintings of Vincent Van Gogh(1853-1890). Some of the other famous paintings of his are Sunflowers, Irises, and The Potato Eaters. Van Gogh had always said; “There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it: how to do it - with much drawing and little colour; how not to do it - with much colour and little drawing.”(http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/). Reason why Van Gogh said that was because you need to learn how to draw and get good enough then slowly add some color in. In Van Gogh’s paintings you can see how boldly he uses colors. Vincent Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853 in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands. His parents were Anna Cornelia Carbentus and Theodorus Van Gogh, a minister of Dutch Reformed Church. He had two brothers and three sisters. Through out the Van Gogh’s family they had history of being talented in art and were very religious. Vincent’s name has been used through out the family also; his grandfather was named Vincent and was name after his father’s uncle, who was the successful sculptor Vincent Van Gogh(1729-1802). Van Gogh’s parents sent him away to an elementary boarding school, which he was very distressed to leave his family to go to school; even though it was twenty miles away from his home town. When he went to middle school, a very successful artist taught Van Gogh how to draw his name was, Constantijn C. Huysmans. While in middle school his uncle had helped him find a job with an art dealer Goupil & Cie in The Hague. Van Gogh was twenty now and was already making more money then his father by working for the art dealer. Van Gogh’s uncle and father had gotten him another job for a dealership in Paris, but was soon terminated for becoming resentful in how the art was treated. After returning to England from Paris he had found another job as a supply teacher in a boarding school in Ramsgate. While he worked at the boarding school he would sketch the harbor it looked over. Later on the school relocated and Van Gogh went but it didn’t work out, so he decided to leave and become a Methodist minister’s assistant. Van Gogh returned to his home for Christmas and stayed there for six months.
While he was home he had gotten a job in a bookstore. Van Gogh was becoming more religious and wanted to become a pastor. His parents sent him away in 1877 to Amsterdam to study theology. Van Gogh stayed with one of his uncles and studied for an entrance exam with another uncle who was a respected theologian and who published the first “Life of Jesus.” Sadly Van Gogh never passed his entrance exam and later left his uncles a year later to take a three-month course, which he failed, at Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool Protestant missionary school in
Laeken, near Brussels. He returned to Cuesmes in October 1879 where he was very interested in ordinary people and scenes around him. Later on he decided to travel to Brussels that autumn and followed his brothers’ recommendation to study with a very prominent Dutch artist
Willem Roelofs, who later persuaded Van Gogh to attend the Royal Academy of Art. Van Gogh moved to Nuenen in 1883, and it was there that he devoted himself to drawing. He used to pay neighborhood boys to find birds’ nests for subject matter, and would sketch. Van Gogh got married in 1884 to Margot Begemann; one of his neighbors daughters that was ten years older then him. Both of their families were opposed to the two of them getting married. In spring of 1885 he had finished his first major piece of art, The Potato Eaters. It was the first time that Paris was interested in any of Van Gogh’s work. Van Gogh had is work exhibited for the first time in The Hague, in a paint dealers window. During 1885 he did a lot of Still Life paintings. The Still Life paintings that are regarded for their technical mastery are: Still-Life with Straw Hat and Pipe and Still-life with Earthen Pot and Clogs. These two paintings have smooth, precise brushwork and fine shading of the colors. Van Gogh stayed in Nuenen for two years and in that period of time he had painted numerous drawing and watercolors and nearly 200 oil paintings. Most of his early artwork consisted of earth tones, which didn’t sell because they were to dark and not in style of bright impressionist paintings. In November of 1885 he moved again to Antwerp where he started to study color theory. He spent time in museums looking at work by Peter Paul Rubens, and later started gaining more color in his artwork. Later on he decided to take the higher- level admissions exam at the Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and January of 1886, enrolled in painting and drawing. He then traveled to Paris in the spring of 1886 where he became very interested in and collected Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which are paintings featuring landscapes, tales from history, theatre, and pleasure quarters. Van Gogh used this method in several of his paintings in the background such as: Portrait of Père Tanguy, The Courtesan or Oiran, and Plum Tree in Blossom. Arles was his next home in the year of 1888 where his art became more vibrate in color. He worked on several different paintings that year while waiting to move into his yellow house. The paintings he was worked on were: Van Gogh 's Chair, Bedroom in Arles, The Night Café, The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, Starry Night Over the Rhone, and Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers, which all were painted in order to decorate the yellow house. Van Gogh committed himself to the hospital in 1889 at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole for suffering from hallucinations and allusions. While he was staying at the hospital his subjects in his artwork were of the garden and the clinic. Most of his work from the hospital consisted of swirls in them like the painting, The Starry Night. He was allowed to take short walks that were supervised and he would get ideas for a new painting. The paintings he got from the walks were: Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background, Cypresses, Cornfield with Cypresses, and Country road in Provence by Night. Vincent Van Gogh had always been troubled by mental illness, and they didn’t become extreme until the last few years of his life. His depression grew and on July 27, 1890 he shot himself in the chest in a field with a revolver. Van Gogh survived the gunshot but didn’t realize how fatal the shot was and died two days later in the Ravoux Inn.

Work Cited
"Vincent Van Gogh Biography - His Life and Times." Vincent Van Gogh Gallery - Welcome! Web. 09 June 2010. .

Vincent Van Gogh Biography. Web. 09 June 2010. .

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890). Web. 09 June 2010. .

Cited: "Vincent Van Gogh Biography - His Life and Times." Vincent Van Gogh Gallery - Welcome! Web. 09 June 2010. . Vincent Van Gogh Biography. Web. 09 June 2010. . Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890). Web. 09 June 2010. .