Vincent van Gogh: The Man Who Painted the Sun

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In a career that spanned a mere decade, he created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. His works are characterized by their bold, symbolic colors and dramatic, impulsive, and expressive brushwork that were foundational to modern art. Born into a family of art dealers and ministers, van Gogh’s own life was a tumultuous pilgrimage through various vocations—art dealer, teacher, lay preacher—before he finally, at the age of 27, answered the relentless call to become an artist. His story is not merely the biography of a painter; it is the chronicle of a soul in a desperate, often painful, search for meaning, connection, and light, a search he conducted with a raw honesty that he poured onto his Canvas. Plagued by severe mental illness and living in poverty, he sold only one painting during his lifetime. Yet, his legacy, carefully preserved by his family, would eventually bloom, transforming the tormented, obscure artist into a global cultural icon, a symbol of the archetypal misunderstood genius whose vibrant, emotional art continues to touch the very core of the human experience.

The story of Vincent van Gogh does not begin with a sun-drenched wheatfield, but in the damp, muted landscapes of the Dutch province of North Brabant. Born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, he was the son of a Protestant pastor, a fact that would instill in him a lifelong yearning for spiritual purpose and a profound sympathy for the humble and the downtrodden. The young Vincent was a serious, quiet child, whose early life was shadowed by the ghost of a stillborn elder brother, also named Vincent, born exactly one year before him. This early brush with mortality and replacement may have seeded a deep-seated melancholy that would follow him throughout his life. His family’s connection to the art world was deep; several of his uncles were successful art dealers. At sixteen, Vincent followed this path, joining the Hague branch of the art dealership Goupil & Cie. This was his first formal education in art, a period of immersion where he learned to discern quality, understand the market, and appreciate the stoic beauty of the Hague School painters and the French realists like Jean-François Millet. He was competent, even promising, but a profound restlessness stirred within him. The commercialization of art, the act of placing a monetary value on a piece of a creator’s soul, began to gnaw at his sensitive disposition. Transfers to the firm’s London and Paris branches only deepened his disillusionment. In Paris, the cultural heart of the 19th century, he was more drawn to the city's Museums and the spiritual solace of the Bible than to the ledgers of the Art Gallery. By 1876, his religious fervor had eclipsed his interest in commerce, and he was dismissed. What followed was a period of desperate searching. He sought to channel his intense desire to serve humanity into a tangible form. He became a teacher in England, then a lay preacher in the bleak, impoverished coal-mining district of the Borinage in Belgium. Here, among the miners, or “charbonniers”, he witnessed a raw, unvarnished humanity that resonated with his own inner turmoil. He gave away his possessions, slept on straw, and descended into the mines to share the suffering of his flock. His evangelical zeal was so extreme, however, that the church authorities dismissed him for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” This rejection was a devastating blow, a spiritual crisis that paradoxically clarified his true calling. If he could not preach the word of God through sermons, he would preach it through images. In the winter of 1880, at the age of 27, broken but resolute, Vincent van Gogh decided to become an artist. He wrote to his devoted younger brother, Theo, an art dealer who would become his lifelong confidant and financial savior: “I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things… But the problem is to try to put them to good use.”

Returning to the Netherlands, van Gogh embarked on a rigorous, almost monastic, period of self-education. He had no formal training beyond a brief stint in Brussels and Antwerp, but he possessed an iron will. He relentlessly practiced drawing, copying prints by masters and focusing on the human figure. His early subjects were the peasants and weavers of the Brabant countryside, the same humble folk he had sought to serve as a preacher. He saw in their toil-worn hands and weathered faces a raw dignity and a spiritual truth that he felt was absent from academic art. This early Dutch period, from 1883 to 1885, was defined by a dark, earthy palette of somber browns, olive greens, and deep greys. He used Oil Paint not to capture a fleeting, beautiful impression of reality, but to dig into its very substance. His brushwork was already becoming distinctive: thick, coarse, and laden with impasto, as if he were sculpting with paint, trying to convey the very texture of the soil and the weight of his subjects' lives. This phase culminated in what he considered his first great masterpiece: The Potato Eaters (1885). The painting depicts a family of peasants huddled around a rough-hewn table, sharing a meager meal of potatoes under the dim light of a single oil lamp. It is a work of brutal honesty. He deliberately chose models with coarse, almost grotesque features, wanting to show them in their unvarnished reality. “I have tried to emphasize that these people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they are putting in the dish,” he wrote to Theo. “It speaks of manual labor and of how they have thus honestly earned their food.” The painting was a radical departure from the romanticized peasant scenes popular at the time. It was a sermon in paint, a testament to the harsh, yet noble, cycle of life for those who lived by the earth. It was raw, clumsy, and profoundly human—it was Vincent.

In 1886, seeking to escape the provincial confines of the Netherlands and immerse himself in the vanguard of modern art, Vincent moved to Paris to live with Theo. If the Dutch landscape had forged his soul, the Parisian metropolis would ignite his palette. Paris in the late 19th century was a vibrant, chaotic laboratory of new ideas. The city was still absorbing the shockwaves of Impressionism, a movement that had dissolved solid forms into shimmering moments of light and color. Though its revolutionary peak had passed, its influence was everywhere, and a new generation of artists—the Post-Impressionists—was already pushing its principles in radical new directions. For Vincent, Paris was a revelation. He enrolled briefly at the studio of Fernand Cormon, where he met fellow artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. He frequented the cafés of Montmartre, engaging in passionate debates about art. Most importantly, he saw new art. He saw the luminous landscapes of Claude Monet, the pointillist experiments of Georges Seurat, and the bold compositions of Paul Gauguin. A pivotal discovery was the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print, an art form that had become a craze in Paris known as Japonisme. Vincent was captivated by the flat planes of vibrant color, the strong outlines, and the unconventional, often cropped, compositions. He began to collect these prints avidly, even curating an exhibition of them at a local café. The influence was immediate and transformative. His dark, muddy Dutch palette erupted into a riot of brilliant color. He began to experiment with the Impressionists' broken brushwork and the Pointillists' dots of pure color, creating a series of self-portraits and cityscapes that chart his rapid, almost violent, artistic evolution. The somber realist was reborn as a modern colorist. He learned that color was not just for describing an object; it could be a force in its own right, capable of expressing emotion, mood, and an inner spiritual reality. Paris had given him a new language, but the frenetic, competitive pace of the city also wore on his fragile nerves. He yearned for a place where he could apply this new language to a landscape that burned with an intensity to match his own. He dreamed of the South.

In February 1888, exhausted by the Parisian hustle and seeking a “Japanese” clarity of light, Vincent van Gogh boarded a train south to Arles, in Provence. The journey marked the beginning of the most productive and revolutionary period of his life. In the sun-drenched, windswept landscape of southern France, he found the brilliant light and vibrant color his soul had been craving. “The sun of the high south, which beats down on one's head, it makes you crazy, it drives you completely crazy,” he wrote, a statement of both ecstatic discovery and dark premonition. His art reached a fever pitch of creativity. In just 15 months, he produced over 200 paintings and 100 drawings, a body of work that includes many of his most iconic masterpieces. He painted the blossoming orchards in delicate pinks and whites, the searing yellow of the wheatfields under a turquoise sky, and the local postman, Joseph Roulin, as a benevolent patriarch. He rented a small, two-story building at 2 Place Lamartine, which he painted a vibrant yellow and dubbed “The Yellow House.” This was to be more than a home; it was his dream of a “Studio of the South,” a collective where like-minded artists could live and work together, forging the art of the future. His style now fully crystallized. He applied paint with thick, writhing strokes, his brushwork a direct record of his emotional response to the world. He used color not naturalistically, but symbolically. In The Night Café (1888), he used jarring reds and greens to “express the terrible passions of humanity,” creating an atmosphere of oppressive anxiety. In his famous Sunflowers series, he used every conceivable shade of yellow to express gratitude, joy, and the life-giving force of the sun itself. Yellow, for Vincent, became the color of hope, of friendship, of divine love. The centerpiece of his dream for the Studio of the South was Paul Gauguin, a painter whom Vincent admired intensely. After much persuasion (and funding from Theo), Gauguin arrived in Arles in October 1888. The initial period was one of feverish artistic exchange, but their temperaments—Vincent’s volatile and earnest, Gauguin’s arrogant and cynical—were destined to clash. They argued ferociously about art and life. The dream of a harmonious artists’ colony quickly soured. On the night of December 23, 1888, following a heated confrontation, Vincent suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. In a state of psychosis, he took a razor and severed a portion of his left ear, wrapped it in paper, and delivered it to a local prostitute. The Yellow House had become a house of horrors. The sun of the south had finally broken him.

Following the ear incident, Vincent was hospitalized in Arles. Tormented by hallucinations and paranoia, he oscillated between periods of acute crisis and profound remorse. The townspeople, frightened by “le fou roux” (the red-headed madman), petitioned to have him confined. In May 1889, recognizing that he could no longer care for himself, Vincent voluntarily admitted himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in the nearby town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. His new home was a former monastery, a cloistered world of quiet gardens and barred windows. Yet, this confinement paradoxically unleashed a new, cosmic dimension in his art. Prevented from roaming freely, he painted the world he could see from his window: the asylum's walled garden, the gnarled olive trees, and the cypress trees that clawed at the sky like dark green flames. He began to reinterpret the works of his heroes, like Millet, infusing their peasant scenes with his own electrifying color and energy. It was here, in the depths of his suffering, that he painted his most transcendent masterpiece, The Starry Night (June 1889). Looking out of his east-facing window before sunrise, he transformed the tranquil dawn into a celestial cataclysm. A colossal, swirling vortex of cosmic energy dominates the sky, a maelstrom of blues and yellows that seems to pulse with a life of its own. The moon and stars blaze with an inner light, no longer distant points but living, burning entities. Below, a quiet village sleeps, anchored to the earth by the solid form of a church spire. In the foreground, a massive cypress tree rises like a bridge between the earthly and the heavenly, a dark, searching flame of aspiration and mortality. The painting is not a depiction of what he saw, but a profound vision of the turbulent, spiritual forces he felt coursing through the universe—and through himself. It is a work born from the crucible of madness, but it is not a work of madness. It is a testament to the human spirit's capacity to find order and sublime beauty even in the face of overwhelming chaos.

After a year in the asylum, Vincent’s condition seemed to stabilize enough for him to be discharged. In May 1890, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small village near Paris, to be closer to Theo and under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, an amateur painter and physician who had been recommended by Pissarro. This final period was one of frantic, almost desperate, productivity. In just over two months, he painted more than 70 canvases. His style in Auvers became even more agitated. His brushstrokes grew longer, more serpentine, his colors more somber and emotionally charged. He painted the thatched-roof cottages of the village, the vibrant portrait of Dr. Gachet (which would one day become one of the most expensive paintings ever sold), and the sprawling, undulating wheatfields surrounding the town. Among his last works is the profoundly unsettling Wheatfield with Crows (July 1890). Painted on a wide, double-square Canvas, the work depicts a vast, turbulent wheatfield under a stormy, menacing sky. Three paths diverge, leading nowhere, creating a sense of confusion and entrapment. A flock of black crows takes flight, a dark and ominous symbol. For decades, this painting was mythologized as his final work, a painted suicide note. While historical evidence suggests he painted other works after this one, it undeniably captures a mood of profound desolation and despair. The vibrant yellows of Arles are now muted, oppressed by a sky of deep, almost violent, blue. The creative fire that had burned so brightly was exhausting its fuel. On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh walked into a wheatfield and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He staggered back to his room at the Auberge Ravoux, where he died two days later in the arms of his beloved brother Theo. His last words were reportedly, “The sadness will last forever.” He was 37 years old.

At the time of his death, Vincent van Gogh was a complete unknown, a ghost in the annals of art history. He had sold one painting, his exhibitions had been few and met with ridicule, and his name was known only to a small circle of avant-garde artists. His legacy, and the nearly 900 paintings and over 1,000 drawings he left behind, rested in the hands of his grieving brother. But tragedy struck again. Theo, devastated by Vincent’s death and suffering from syphilis, died just six months later. The task of preserving Vincent’s life’s work fell to Theo’s 28-year-old widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. It is a historical fact of immense importance that without her tireless devotion, the world might never have known Vincent van Gogh. Returning to Holland with her infant son (also named Vincent) and a vast, seemingly worthless collection of art, Johanna made it her life’s mission to win her brother-in-law the recognition he deserved. She methodically organized the chaotic collection of paintings, meticulously managed loans to exhibitions, and, most crucially, undertook the monumental task of editing and publishing the voluminous correspondence between Vincent and Theo. The publication of these letters was a masterstroke. They revealed the man behind the art: a deeply intelligent, sensitive, and articulate soul. They provided a narrative, a story of struggle and sacrifice that humanized the difficult, revolutionary art. They helped construct the powerful myth of the suffering genius, the artist-martyr who gave his life for his vision. Slowly, the world began to take notice.

• Major retrospective exhibitions in Paris (1901) and Amsterdam (1905) introduced his electrifying work to a wider audience and a new generation of artists.
• German Expressionist painters saw in his emotional use of color and raw brushwork a precursor to their own artistic aims.
• Art critics and historians began to write about him, positioning him as a pivotal “father of modern art.”
• By the 1930s, his fame had grown exponentially, fueled by popular biographies like Irving Stone’s Lust for Life and its subsequent Hollywood film adaptation.

The 20th century saw his fame explode into a global phenomenon. His paintings, once unsellable, began to command astronomical prices at auction, becoming symbols of cultural and financial prestige. His life story became a universal parable of creativity and madness. Today, his work is reproduced on everything from coffee mugs to posters, his image a permanent fixture in the popular imagination. The Museum dedicated to him in Amsterdam is a site of pilgrimage, drawing millions of visitors who come not just to see the paintings, but to feel a connection to the man who painted the sun, who found beauty in a starry night, and who, in his tragic, brilliant, and all-too-brief life, taught the world to see with its heart.