The Potato Eaters, 1885

The Potato Eaters - Some see beauty in it, precisely because the characters are so genuine. Theo van Gogh

Postman Roulin

I have made portraits of a whole family, he wrote, the postman, his wife, the baby, the little boy, and the son of sixteen, all characters. We look at the Postman Roulin painting.

The Starry Night, 1889

Analysis of A Night of Light: Van Gogh's The Starry Night, 1889

Analysis of The Sunflowers

Van Gogh's Sunflowers are among his most famous paintings, but few people realize he did many sunflower pictures, not just the most famous Vase with Twelve Sunflowers and Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers. These were canvases he made to decorate the Yellow House in Arles in anticipation of his friend Paul Gauguin's visit, and in the hope that other artists would follow and form a Utopian art community. Some of Vincent's sunflower paintings are all but indistinguishable, with only tiny differences to prove one reproduction is different from the next. During his stay in Paris, he painted cut sunflowers in different stages of being, from fresh to wilted to dry.

Van Gogh's Postman Roulin

I have made portraits of a whole family, he wrote, the postman, his wife, the baby, the little boy, and the son of sixteen, all characters.   We look at the Postman Roulin painting.

Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853–29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age of 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Little appreciated during his lifetime, his fame grew in the years after his death. Today, he is widely regarded as one of history's greatest painters and an important contributor to the foundations of modern art. Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late twenties, and most of his best-known works were produced during his final two years. He produced more than 2,000 artworks, consisting of around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. He was little known during his lifetime, however his work was a strong influence on the Modernist art that followed, and today many of his pieces—including his numerous self portraits, landscapes, portraits and sunflowers—are among the world's most recognizable and expensive works of art.

Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers and traveled between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught in England. An early vocational aspiration was to become a pastor and preach the gospel, and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium. During this time he began to sketch people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of sombre earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later he moved to the south of France and was taken by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style which became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.

The extent to which his mental illness affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticise his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of sickness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, Van Gogh's late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and "longing for concision and grace".