Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born into a Dutch pastor's family in the country's south, already burdened by a heavy weight in his very name—he was named after an elder brother who had died at birth. Introverted and sensitive from childhood, absorbed in nature and books, he tasted loneliness as a boy, and formed with his brother Theo the deepest bond of his life. This family gave him the ground tone of his faith, but it could not give him a smooth road forward.

The first half of his life was almost a string of failures. Starting as a junior clerk at the Goupil art dealership, he moved between The Hague, London, and Paris, and was finally dismissed; turning to religion, he went off to a Belgian mining district to share hardship with the poor miners, only to be let go by the church for his excessive zeal. After being driven to the wall time and again, it was on the ruins of his failed ministry that, at twenty-seven, he made the decision that changed his fate: he would become a painter.

Having started so late, he chased after it with an almost self-punishing diligence. In the Dutch countryside he painted The Potato Eaters in gloomy, heavy tones, gazing at the rough hands of the peasants and the dim yellow lamp. Only when he joined Theo, an art dealer in Paris, and encountered the bright light of Impressionism and Pointillism, did his canvas suddenly come alive; Theo's support and the letters constantly passing between them became from then on a double lifeline that sustained him and recorded him.

Arles in the south was his brief flowering. Its blazing sun burned his color to its utmost, and Sunflowers bloomed in the 'Yellow House'; he even dreamed of gathering kindred spirits to build a 'house of painters.' But his cohabitation with Gauguin broke down amid clashes of ideas, his mind collapsed with it, and the night he cut off his ear became a shadow he could never shake for the rest of his life. Afterward he voluntarily entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and amid the ebb and flow of his illness painted the swirling, burning Starry Night.

In the summer of 1890, he went north to Auvers to seek treatment, and in the roughly seventy final days of his life painted at an astonishing pace, dying at last of a gunshot wound at only thirty-seven. In his lifetime he was all but nameless, poor and sick, and sold only a handful of paintings. It was Theo's widow Johanna who organized the letters and unsold works, letting the world finally see this 'burning soul of painting'—who in ten years and some two thousand works turned his inner fire and pain into color and brushstroke, becoming a pioneer of Post-Impressionism and one of the most remembered names in the history of Western art.