In ten years he made some 2,100 works and sold almost none. He painted the cypresses like green flame, the wheatfields under crows, and a night more alive and more richly coloured than the day.
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Dutch village of Groot-Zundert, the son of a pastor. He came to painting late. He had been an art dealer, a teacher, and a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Borinage before, at twenty-seven, he decided to become an artist.
What followed is one of the most concentrated bodies of work in the history of art. Moving through the grey palette of the Dutch peasantry, the divided colour of Paris, and finally the blazing yellows and cobalt blues of the South, he built his own language of paint — thick, urgent, laid on in visible strokes that still seem to be moving.
In Arles he dreamt of a “studio of the South,” a fellowship of painters. The dream collapsed, and at times so did he; he worked on through hospital stays at Saint-Rémy, and in his last seventy days at Auvers-sur-Oise he made some seventy paintings. He died in July 1890, at thirty-seven, having sold almost nothing while he lived.
His brother Theo, an art dealer, supported him to the end and kept every letter. It is largely through those letters — and through Theo’s widow, Jo, who published them — that we still hear the mind behind the paint.
Twelve works from the peak years. Click any painting to see it whole — the colour is the point, and it repays looking closely.
I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.
— to his brother Theo · Arles, 1888
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
— Vincent van Gogh
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
— to his brother Theo
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
— to his brother Theo · 1882
This is a curated online retrospective — a small, freely accessible room built around twelve of van Gogh’s best-known paintings and a handful of lines from his letters.
All works reproduced here are in the public domain and are shown courtesy of the holding museums via Wikimedia Commons. Dates and attributions follow the collections that hold each painting.
It’s meant to do one simple thing well: put the paintings up large, in the dark, and let them breathe.