Vincent van Gogh

Valentina Gil Duque.

He painted some 800 paintings (including 43 self-portraits and 148
watercolours) and made more than 1,600 drawings. A central figure in
his life was his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, who
provided him with continuous and selfless financial support. The great
friendship between them is documented in the numerous letters
exchanged since August 1872. Of the 800 surviving letters from the
painter, some 650 were for Theo; the others are correspondence with
friends and family
The quality of his work was recognized only after his death, in a
retrospective exhibition in 1890, and he is currently considered one of
the great masters in the history of painting. He greatly influenced the art
of the 20th century, he died at the age of thirty-seven from a gunshot
wound; It is not yet known for sure if it was a suicide or an involuntary
manslaughter. Although there is a general tendency to speculate that his
mental illness influenced his painting, art critic Robert Hughes believes
that the artist's works are executed under complete control; in fact, the
painter never worked during the periods when he was ill
Biography
He was born on March 30, 1853. The son of an austere and humble
Dutch Protestant pastor named Theodorus and his wife Anna
Cornelia, Vincent received the same name given to a brother who was
stillborn exactly one year earlier. On May 1, 1857, his brother Theo
was born and they both had four more siblings: Cornelius Vincent,
Elisabetha Huberta, Anna Cornelia and Wilhelmina Jacoba.
During his childhood, he attended school intermittently and
irregularly, as his parents sent him to different boarding schools. The
first of them in Zevenbergen in 1864, where he studied French and
German.6 Two years later he enrolled in the HBS Koning Willem II
secondary school (Tilburg) living with the Hannik family at Sint
Annaplein 18-19 and stayed there until he died. He left school
permanently at the age of fifteen.7 It was then that he began his
interest in painting.About his childhood, Vincent van Gogh
commented: "My youth was sad, cold and sterile"
First jobs
From a very young age he showed a difficult character and a strong
temperament. After dropping out and a year at Zundert, van Gogh
began working in 1869, at the age of 16, as an apprentice at Goupil
& Co. (later Boussod & Valadon), a major international art trading
company. of The Hague in which his uncle Vincent was a partner.10
He adapted quite well to this new life, writing:
Four years later he was transferred to London to supply works of art
to local businesses and it was there that he had his first contact with
Eugenia, daughter of Úrsula Loyer, patron of the pension where he
stayed. He fell in love with her, but the girl was engaged and
rejected him.11 In 1874, a year after their stay in London, he spent
the family vacation in Helvoirt and confessed to her discomfort with
Eugenia. He lived in isolation, reading religious books and losing
interest in his work.
On January 10, 1878, in a letter addressed to his brother Theo de él, he
announced that he had been fired from the art gallery and that he would have
to leave on April 1. His dismissal was due to the fact that he interposed his
personal preferences over the sales that he had to make. However, his
brother Theo stayed at Boussod & Valadon, four years his junior, who would
work there from 1873 until his death and without whose dedication his
brother's short and intense artistic career would never have been possible.
older than him His family proposed that he open a gallery himself, where he
could offer the kind of painting he chose. He rejected the idea and later
urged his brother, also an art dealer, to drop his work as "the art trade was a
farce".
The yellow house
His idea was to share the house with Theo, and with the members of the
studio. The fact coincides with a growing awareness of the changes in his
work. The building was number 2 on Place Lamartine in Arles. The artist
rented two large rooms on the ground floor as a study and a kitchen and
two rooms on the first floor overlooking the square. The window with
the open shutters on the first floor is the guest room, where Paul Gauguin
moved in October 1888, with the idea of creating an artists' studio. The
window with the shutters closed is the one in van Gogh's room, which he
depicted in The Bedroom in Arles.
Death
During the last thirty months of his life he produced 500 works and
in his last 69 days he signed up to 79 paintings. On February 22,
1890, Van Gogh suffered a new crisis that was "the starting point of
one of the saddest episodes in a life already plagued with sad
events." This period lasted until the end of April, during which time
he was unable to bring himself to write; however, he continued to
draw and paint
Vincent was buried in the Auvers-sur-Oise cemetery. It is considered
that his mental illnesses were the consequence of mental disorders
caused by kidney failure, probably due to kidney stones, although
according to other authors his mental illness was caused by
syphilis.86 87 Shortly after Vincent's death, his brother Theo was
admitted to a clinic in Utrecht, where he died on January 25, 1891,
six months after his brother's death. In 1914 Theo's body was
exhumed and buried next to Vincent's.
plays
A picture is worth a
thousand words
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