Biography of Vincent Van Gogh.

Vincent Van Gogh

A great painter whose art and life are too intertwined to be distinguished from each other, who led the real establishment of modern painting by subverting the understanding of art of his era.

Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853 in the Netherlands, in the village of Groot-Zundert, south of Brenda. Her father was a poor village priest, and her mother Cornelia was the daughter of a farmer. In addition to Vincent, the family had 3 more daughters named Elizabeth, Anna and Wil, and 2 more boys named Cor and Theo.

Vincent's childhood passed by the age of twelve in his village, alone with nature in solitude. at the age of 16, he worked as a sales clerk for Goupil Galleries, first in La Hayde, then in Brussels, and then in Paris for three years.

He also began to correspond with his brother Theo during these years. in 1873, he moved to the London branch of the same gallery, but soon left here and moved to Paris. Here he was also expelled as a result of disagreements with gallery managers and returned to England again in 1876. Here he taught at a private school in Ramsgate for a low fee. When he returned to his family on Christmas Day, he became passionate about becoming a priest like his father, and in 1877 he took the entrance exam to the clergyman training seminary of the University of Amsterdam, but did not win, and returned to his paternal home.

Then, in 1878, he became a volunteer pastor in the village where there were Borinage mines in Belgium. Although his life here was spent in misery and poverty, perhaps it was his happiest time. He devoted himself to the poor lives of miners. The villagers also looked at him as a "Contemporary Jesus". His passion for painting also began in this place, which became the turning point of his fate. He asked his brother Theo for paper and a pencil and started making sketches of miners.

After leaving here, Vincent, who wanted to study painting, established a friendship with the painter Ridden van Rappard in Brussels and took anatomy and perspective lessons from him. But after a while he fell ill and returned to Etten with his family. Decommissioning his profession as a clergyman and choosing to become a painter, he caused a rift between him and his father. Meanwhile, Vincent, who was in love with his widowed cousin Kee, proposed to her, but was dec. Van Gogh stayed at La Hayde until September 1883, where he made his first oil paintings.

When his father died in January 1886, he went to Antwerp and started working at the Antwerp Academy. Two months later, he went to Paris with his brother Theo. Theo met all his needs and paid for the painting materials. With the help of his brother, he began to get acquainted in Paris with such famous painters as Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Paul Gauguin. He was in the art center of the West and was trying to evaluate it to the fullest, but he hadn't grown up in this environment like other painters, he had decoupled from painful lives and incompetent people. He had learned not to obey the rules, but the most brutal of survival battles. All this would have led him to break down the traditions that were considered solid in the ages before him with a snap, and his art, which seemed to be napping in the dull, foggy climate of the north, would start boiling like a volcano, emitting flames of color. The appearance of emotions in him in an unprocessed pure state made people nervous and caused them to move away from him. Van Gogh, who was always disappointed in his relationship with people, had to tell about the human love and compassion of the enthusiasm in him not with words, but with paints.

In Paris, he made more than two hundred paintings with vivid colors, edgy and lithe lines.

his painting "aycicekler"

On February 20, 1888, he settled in a yellow building in the southern French town of Arles, where he made his most famous paintings ("Kayaks on the Shore", "Sunflowers", "Coffee Landscape at Night"...).

In October 1888, his friend Paul Gauguin also came to Van Gogh at his invitation. Van Gogh greatly admired Paul Gauguin, but he was not used to living so intertwined with another person, and besides, he had thoroughly given himself to drinking. Paul Gauguin was also beginning to be annoyed by Van Gogh's passionate personality. Van Gogh, when painting, was squeezing the paint not on the palette, but directly from the tube onto the canvas and crushing it with his fingers. And sometimes he ate the paint or squeezed it into his food.

One night, with a razor in his hand, he threatened Paul Gauguin with death and went to his workshop and cut off his own ear. According to a rumor, he gave the ear he cut as a gift to a woman who worked in a brothel. Upon this incident, his brother Theo admitted him to Arles Hospital for two weeks. although he returned home in the early 1890s and made his own cut-eared portrait, he soon began to have dreams again and was hospitalized in the same hospital. Two months later, he was voluntarily admitted to the Saint Remy Mental Hospital.

This period was quite fruitful for his art.

On July 27, 1890, while painting in the fields, he shot himself in the stomach with his pistol one evening. Theo came to Auvers immediately, but Van Gogh did not want to be treated, and after 2 days he whispered the last word in his brother's ear, saying: "misery will never end," he died on July 29, 1890.

Van Gogh's art, who has died at the age of 37, played the main role in creating a modern understanding of painting, thereby dealing the most effective blow to the traditions of painting that were firmly attached to the reflection of the ages before him in the painting of nature, which was considered intact.

One of Van Gogh's letters to Theo in which we understand his inner world clearly reveals his understanding of art: "I use paint to express with more force what I want to tell for my own purpose than to give what is in front of my eyes the way it is.''

Dr. Gachet's painting Portesi

In the last ten years of his life, Van Gogh painted 900 watercolor and oil paintings and 1100 charcoal paintings. Some of the works of the painter, who is considered one of the pioneers of Impressionism, have become one of the most decisively recognized and most expensive works in the world today. So much so that he completed it about 2 months before he died. Gachet's Portrait was sold for $82.54 million in 1990, his self-portrait without a beard was sold for $71.5 million in 1998, and his painting Irises was sold for $53.9 million in 1987.

his painting "self-portrait" (1887)

Van Gogh suffered financially during his painting career. Thanks to the financial support he received from his brother Theo, he was able to stay afloat. The friendship of the two brothers is documented by their letters to each other from 1872. While the number of Van Gogh's letters to Theo is more than 600, only 40 letters written by Theo to Van Gogh have been found.

His painting "Red Vineyards" (1888)

During his lifetime, he was able to sell the painting The Red Vineyards, which he made only in November 1888. The painting The Red Vineyards was first exhibited at the Les XX exhibition held in Brussels in 1890. The Less XX was a group of twenty Belgian painters, designers and sculptors created in 1883 by the Brussels lawyer, publisher and entrepreneur Octave Maus. Every year, they organized an exhibition with twenty international artists they invited. Van Gogh's painting The Red Vineyard was also purchased for 400 Francs (about $ 1,000-$1,050 in today's money) by the Belgian impressionist painter and art collector Anna Boch, who was also a member of Less XX, at this exhibition held in 1890. Anna Boch, who bought the painting, is again an impressionist painter and the sister of Eugène Boch, a close friend of Van Gogh. Van Gogh also painted a portrait of Eugène Boch (Le Peintre aux Étoiles) in 1888.

The Red Vineyards was later bought by the famous Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, but along with other parts of Shchukin's collection, it was expropriated by the Bolsheviks and given to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.