Vincent Willem van Gogh is a well-known Dutch post-Impressionist painter. During his lifetime, Van Gogh remained poor and unkknown.
Vincent was deeply religious as a younger man and aspired to be a pastor, like his father. He became a teacher in England and then he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he sketched people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette then consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later paintings.
In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. He met many artists including Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin, with whom he became friends. Later, he moved to the south of France and was influenced by the region's strong sunlight. His paintings grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.
Van Gogh invited Gauguin to join him in Arles, but their relationship began to deteriorate. Van Gogh admired Gauguin and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, something that often frustrated Van Gogh. They quarreled about art; Van Gogh increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to desert him, and the situation, which Van Gogh described as one of "excessive tension," rapidly headed towards a crisis point. Deeply remorseful, he then cut off part of his own ear.
Van Gogh went to Paris on May 17, 1890, to visit his brother, Theo. On the advice of Pissarro, Theo had Vincent go to Auvers, just outside Paris. At first, Van Gogh felt relieved at Auvers, but toward the end of June he experienced fits of temper and often quarreled with Gachet. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in a lonely field and died, two days later, in the morning of July 29, 1890.
The greatest masterworks of Vincent van Gogh are from the latest years of his life.