We know van Gogh for his brightly-colored, textured post-Impressionist paintings, but he didn't start this way. He only started focusing on art at age 27, encouraged by his brother Theo, who supported him financially and emotionally. Initially, van Gogh did pencil and charcoal sketches before discovering watercolors through his relative, Anton Mauve. This led to his shift to painting with oils and watercolors. Formal art classes in Antwerp and Paris further developed his technique.
Van Gogh's early works were dark and dreary, but influenced by contemporaries like Monet and the Impressionists, his style gradually lightened, also drawing inspiration from Japanese woodcuts.
The Potato Eaters
This dark scene shows a family of peasants enjoying the fruits of their labour: a dish of potatoes, shared amongst all (with tea). Van Gogh was fascinated with working people. His family was rather affluent, so a life of toiling in the fields was unimaginable to him. Although he viewed the labourers with a sense of “otherness,” he was also in awe of their hardiness and resiliency.
The Potato Eaters is considered by many as van Gogh’s first masterpiece. However, it was also an ill-received painting at the time due to its dark colours, chiaroscuro light, and “caricature-like” figures.
Over time, though, people learned to understand more his message: These people are not concerned with beauty, rather, they are earnest workers enjoying downtime with family as best they can.
Café Terrace at Night
Vincent van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night oil painting is one of the artist's most famous paintings and even if you weren't familiar with it, you could guess the artist due to his signature style. The painting itself isn't actually signed by van Gogh, but historians agree that he painted it because of the style and the fact that he mentioned it in several letters.
As usual, van Gogh uses colour in an interesting way to capture the inviting and warm nature of the café in Arles, France, where he lived and painted many aspects of his everyday life.
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The Bedroom
As the name suggests, The Bedroom is a painting of Vincent van Gogh's bedroom in his "Yellow House" in Arles, France. Van Gogh loved painting things from everyday life.
There are actually three variations of The Bedroom with the portraits above the bed being one of the most significant changes in each. In the first version, the portraits seem to indicate that he was more hopeful, while the second and third versions that were painted nearly a year later weren't so optimistic.
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The Red Vineyard
As the only painting sold in his lifetime (through his brother Theo in Paris), this magnificent painting was the beginning of van Gogh’s popularity. It was sold about four months before his death. As a testament to how sharply van Gogh’s popularity skyrocketed, the painting was first purchased by Anne Boch for about 400 francs, who then sold it two years later to Ivan Morosov for 30,000 francs!
Unlike The Potato Eaters, this scenic portrait of labourers is bright and pleasing to the eye. It’s full of movement and the sun’s reflection on the water is enticing. The yellow paint he used has become dull over time, so imagine an even more brilliant yellow sky! The work is also too fragile for transportation, so the only way to see it is to travel to Moscow when it’s on display.
Sunflowers
The Sunflower Series are some of van Gogh's most famous paintings. The artist took something as common as cut sunflowers and used colour, emotion, and symbolism, possibly representing hope and friendship (since they were intended as a gift), to turn it into something extraordinary.
He painted two series of sunflowers, one in 1887, which depicts the flowers laying on the ground, and this second series in 1888-1889 depicting the flowers in a vase.
They're a fine example of how Vincent van Gogh approached art technically and aesthetically to create meaning in everything he did.
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent van Gogh
Irises
Plants, everyday objects, and van Gogh's surroundings were often chosen as subjects for the artist's paintings. Irises is another fine example of van Gogh's wonderful use of colour, especially when representing nature, and the impasto painting technique he often used.
Impasto is when the artist uses thick layers of paint to create texture. To fully appreciate this quality, you simply have to see the paintings in person.
He painted irises twice at this time in his life; the other painting presents a beautiful bouquet in a yellow vase against a yellow wall (yellow was van Gogh’s favourite colour, if you hadn’t guessed).
Starry Night
Other than his paintings of sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh's quintessential Starry Night is arguably the Vincent van Gogh most famous painting. The unrealistic, and yet perhaps more realistic, use of bold blues and yellows to capture the emotion of the sky in the painting makes the whole thing feel like it's moving. The style has become so synonymous with the artist and the bold brushwork and impasto technique sets it apart from contemporaries.
Art historians believe that the painting reflects the artist's emotional depth and state at the time of the painting as he was a patient in an asylum (after cutting off his ear) when he created it. It’s also interesting to note that while inspiration struck at night, van Gogh actually painted this during the day and had to collage different perspectives together to create the landscape composition he wanted.
I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.
Vincent van Gogh
Self Portrait
Van Gogh painted at least 35 self portraits in his lifetime. Most often it was because he had no money for models and it was an economical way to practise painting people.
We are fortunate that he did paint himself to much, since each portrait gives us insight in how he was feeling about himself while showing his artistic progression. Much is also written in his letters to Theo, which is where we get most of van Gogh’s quotes and awareness about his thoughts.
In the portraits where he is shown as mentally ill, and with his ear bandaged, van Gogh hopes the process of painting himself in such a state could be cathartic and help him recover. It’s both uplifting that he wanted to work to improve, but depressing that his attempts were ineffective.
In this well-known version of his self-portrait, it appears as though he is perhaps rigid with anxiety as his surrounding undulate around him in Impressionist strokes.
Almond Blossom
Van Gogh painted Almond Blossom as a gift for Theo and his wife, Johanna ‘Jo’ Bonger for the birth of their first and only child, little Vincent Willem van Gogh. They named their son after Vincent, for Theo had admired and supported his brother for all his life, and Jo followed suit although she had only known the van Gogh brothers for a short time.
Theo wrote to Vincent: ‘As we told you, we’ll name him after you, and I’m making the wish that he may be as determined and as courageous as you.’
Harking back to Japanese inspiration, van Gogh painted this beautiful hommage to spring, birth, and new beginnings to adorn the walls of the happy family’s home.
Sadly, Theo would die only about 6 months after his brother, leaving Jo and little Vincent with all of van Gogh’s paintings. The two would work to share his work with the world and preserve his art, with little Vincent eventually creating the Van Gogh Museum.
Wheatfield with Crows
One of his final paintings, van Gogh’s work was never more developed than in this foreboding scene. He simultaneously wanted to convey the ‘healthy and fortifying’ nature he found in the countryside as well as ‘sadness, [and] extreme lonliness.’
These concepts sound diametrically opposed, and maybe they are, but maybe they point to the inner-intricacies of van Gogh’s psyche which could hold these two ideas at the same time.
The deep, vivid cobalt blue of a charged, stormy sky hovers over a peaceful wheat field. An earthy path ventures into the tall grass, only to stop short of any destination. The flock of crows can represent freedom in flight, fear, abandonment or even impending doom.
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The Life of Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh was born on 30th March 1853 to Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Carbentus in Zundert, Netherlands. He was the second-born, coming after a stillborn son, also named Vincent. It’s theorised that being the second Vincent, and being the first-born after a miscarriage, affected his relationship with his parents greatly, which may have contributed to his mental health issues.
While admired nowadays, Vincent van Gogh's reputation in life was quite different. While a select few people cared for him, the majority thought him to be mad and abrasive.
Even his artwork was not appreciated by his contemporaries, like Cézanne, who thought it to be too out-of-step with other art at the time, and thus, it didn’t hit the art-appreciating palette well.
When he finally gained traction as an artist, it was because Theo was acting as an art dealer. And, sadly, van Gogh’s popularity only began to catch on just before his death.
While it’s not an excuse to behave badly, we now know that van Gogh struggled a lot with mental health issues (modern scientists think he may have had bipolar disorder and/or borderline personality disorder and/or epilepsy, but nothing is certain) which would have certainty affected his behaviour.
Van Gogh's mental illness ultimately got the better of him and he ended his own life in 1890.
Van Gogh was massively underappreciated during his own time, due to sharing the art stage with contemporaries like Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir, who critics loved, combined with his troubled and abrasive nature. Only at the end of his life did his work gain traction, which was sadly too late, and financial troubles were one of the top things van Gogh cited as his reasoning to commit suicide.
However, his legacy inspired and continues to inspire people from all over the world. Pablo Picasso, for example, was heavily inspired by van Gogh’s work.
There are too many wonderful paintings by Vincent van Gogh to list them all here, but these are some of the most famous and recognisable ones that even those completely new to the artist may be familiar with.
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