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Vincent Van Gogh 1853-1890

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World Map – Holland, province of the Netherlands

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The Potato Eaters, 1885 & �Boots with Laces, 1886

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Self-Portrait with Pipe, 1887 & Self-Portrait in Straw Hat 1887

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Self-Portrait in front of an Easel, 1888 & Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889

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Vase with 12 Sunflowers, 1888 & Sunflowers in a Vase

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Road with Cypresses & Starry Night, 1889

Cypreesses: He combined impressionism with feeling creating Expressionism. His pictures show a dramatic night sky with twinkling stars and twisting trees. The scenes have been built up out of layers of paint so thick, you can see the brush marks. His intense colors and swirling brush strokes make his pictures vivid and full of movement. This is created at a time when Van Gogh was depressed and feeling sad.

Starry Night: This is one of Van Gogh’s most famous and emotionally powerful paintings. The enormous cypress tree in the foreground helps the viewer understand the arrangement of space. Van Gogh uses spiraling lines to create the swirling night sky. Van Gogh was fascinated with astronomy and the sky. He liked to paint haloed stars, moons, and suns.

Sometimes when Van Gogh painted, he would just squirt the paint right on the canvas instead of using a palette – a very thick application.

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Crows Over the Wheat Field, 1890

Van Gogh painted from the landscape he saw of Arles. Sadly, van Gogh suffered from mental illness. By 1889, he was in a mental hospital. He continued to paint furiously, but became more and more depressed.

This is one of his last big canvases. This is a straightforward painting about a coming storm. Harsh winds have darkened the sky, churned the clouds, frightened the crows, and knocked the grass and wheat to the ground.

This is one of his last paintings.

Can you sense the wildness and turmoil he felt by looking at some of his paintings?

He wrote to his brother Theo when the weather in Arles had worsened how there were “vast fields of wheat under troubled skies”, adding that he did not “need to go out of my way to try and express sadness and extreme loneliness”.

Van Gogh died in 1890 when he was 37 years old.

He sold only one painting during his poor and difficult life.