Van Gogh, Vincent Willem 1853-90
Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, one of the pioneers of Expressionism

Van Gogh was born in Groot-Zundert, the son of a Lutheran pastor. At 16 he became an assistant (1869-76) with an international firm of art dealers in their shops in The Hague, London and Paris. An unrequited love affair with an English schoolmistress accentuated his inferiority complex and religious passion. He became an assistant master at Ramsgate and Isleworth (1876) and there trained unsuccessfully to become a Methodist preacher. In 1878 he became an evangelist for a religious society at the Belgian coalmining centre of Le Borinage (1878-80), where, first as a resident, later as an itinerant preacher, he practised the Christian virtues with great zeal and gave away his possessions; he also slept on the floor of a derelict hut.

In April 1881 he at last set off for Brussels to study art, but another unfortunate love affair, this time with a cousin, threw him off balance and he eventually settled in The Hague, where he lived with his model Christien or 'Sien', a prostitute. She appears in the drawing Sorrow (1882) and Sien Posing (1883). In his father's new parish at Nuenen he painted his dark, haunting, domestic scene of peasant poverty, The Potato Eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), his first masterpiece, and Boots (1887, Museum of Art, Baltimore). His devoted brother Theo, now an art dealer, made it possible for him to continue his studies in Paris (1886-88) under Cormon, and there he met Paul Gauguin, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat and the art-collector Tanguy, who is the subject, surrounded by Japanese woodcuts, of one of Van Gogh's remarkable portraits (1887-88).

These new influences brightened his palette and on Lautrec's advice he left Paris to seek the intense colours of the Proven�al landscape at Arles, the subject of many of his best works. There also he painted Sunflowers (1888), The Bridge (1888) and The Chair and the Pipe (1888, Tate Gallery, London) and invited Gauguin to found a community of artists. Gauguin's stay with him ended in a tragic quarrel in which Van Gogh, in remorse for having threatened the other with a razor, cut off part of his own ear. Placed in an asylum at St R�my (1889-90), there he painted the grounds, the Ravine (1889, with increasingly frantic brushstrokes), the keeper and the physician.

In 1890 he went to live at Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, under the supervision of a physician, Dr Paul Gachet, himself an amateur painter and engraver, whom Van Gogh painted. That year an exhaustive article appeared by A Aurier which at last brought Van Gogh some recognition. But on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh shot himself at the scene of his last painting, the foreboding Cornfields with Flight of Birds, and died two days later. Theo, deeply shocked at the news, followed his brother to the grave within six months.

Van Gogh's output included over 800 paintings and 700 drawings, including portraits, self-portraits, still lifes and landscapes. He used colour primarily for its emotive appeal, and profoundly influenced the Fauves and other experimenters of 20th-century art. His letters were published in English in 1958.

Bibliography: M McQuillan, Van Gogh (1989); Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, Vincent Van Gogh: Artist of His Time (1978); Meyer Schapiro, Van Gogh (1950).