биография ван гога на английском
Vincent Van Gogh. Винсент Ван Гог
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh was an outstanding painter of the I9th century. He was born in 1853 in Holland, but he lived much of his life in France. He was a very emotional man, and there was much suffering in his life. Van Gogh did not start painting until he was twenty-seven, ten years before he died. Before becoming a painter, he was a teacher, an art dealer and a church preacher. However, Van Gogh was mentally ill. During one of his fits of madness he attacked his friend, the artist Paul Gauguin. In another fit of madness, Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. Eventually he went into a mental hospital but he did not get any better. Finally, in 1890 Vincent Van Gogh shot himself. His last words were ‘La tristesse durera’. (The sadness will continue.)
His style of painting was very different from classical art. He painted pictures of the sunny, hot regions of France. Nobody has ever painted cornfields or sunflowers like Van Gogh. His paintings are full of color and sunlight. He looked for interesting shapes and exciting colors. He liked to work freely and quickly. There is fast movement in many of his paintings. Sometimes the trees look like fire. The sun, the moon, and stars move rapidly in the sky. He also painted pictures of people. Today his paintings are worth millions of pounds but in his lifetime he only sold one. Like his life, his art was always unusual and very emotional.
Винсент Ван Гог
Винсент Ван Гог был выдающимся художником 19-го века. Он родился в 1853 году в Голландии, но он прожил большую часть своей жизни во Франции. Он был очень эмоциональным человеком, и в его жизни было много страданий. Ван Гог не рисовал до двадцати семи лет, он начал рисовать за десять лет до своей смерти. Прежде чем стать художником, он был учителем, арт-дилером и церковным проповедником. Но Ван Гог был психически болен. Во время одного из приступов безумия он напал на своего друга, художника Поля Гогена. В другом припадке безумия, Ван Гог отрезал часть своего собственного уха. В конце концов, он был госпитализирован в психиатрическую больницу, но ему не стало лучше. Наконец, в 1890 году Винсент Ван Гог застрелился. Его последние слова были «La Tristesse durera» (Печаль будет продолжаться.)
Его стиль живописи очень отличается от классического искусства. Он писал солнечные, теплые регионы Франции. Никто никогда не писал нивы или подсолнухи так, как Ван Гог. Его картины полны цвета и солнечного света. Он искал интересные формы и яркие цвета. Он любил свободно и быстро работать. Движение присутствует во многих его картинах. Иногда деревья выглядят как огонь. Солнце, луна и звезды быстро движутся в небе. Он также рисовал портреты. Сегодня его картины стоят миллионы фунтов, но в жизни он продал всего одну из них. Как и его жизнь, его искусство всегда было необычно и очень эмоционально.
My English Pages | Learn English Grammar Online
Short biography of Van Gogh
Develop your reading skills.
Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)
Vincent Willem van Gogh is a well-known Dutch post-Impressionist painter. During his lifetime, Van Gogh remained poor and unkknown.
Early life
Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, to upper middle class parents. He spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers before traveling to The Hague, London and Paris.
He was deeply religious as a younger man and aspired to be a pastor, like his father. He became a teacher in England and then he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he sketched people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette then consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later paintings.
France
In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. He met many artists including Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin, with whom he became friends. Later, he moved to the south of France and was influenced by the region’s strong sunlight. His paintings grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.
Van Gogh invited Gauguin to join him in Arles, but their relationship began to deteriorate. Van Gogh admired Gauguin and desperately wanted to be treated as his equal, but Gauguin was arrogant and domineering, something that often frustrated Van Gogh. They quarreled about art; Van Gogh increasingly feared that Gauguin was going to desert him, and the situation, which Van Gogh described as one of «excessive tension,» rapidly headed towards a crisis point. Deeply remorseful, he then cut off part of his own ear.
Mental illness
This incident was the first serious sign of the mental health problems that were to afflict Van Gogh for the remaining days of his life. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals and swung between periods of inertia, depression and incredibly concentrated artistic activity. His work reflected the intense colours and strong light of the countryside around him. On May 9, 1889, he asked to be admitted to the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de Provence, a hospital for the mentally ill. In the year Van Gogh spent at the asylum he worked as much as he had at Arles, producing 150 paintings and hundreds of drawings.
Death
Van Gogh went to Paris on May 17, 1890, to visit his brother, Theo. On the advice of Pissarro, Theo had Vincent go to Auvers, just outside Paris. At first, Van Gogh felt relieved at Auvers, but toward the end of June he experienced fits of temper and often quarreled with Gachet. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in a lonely field and died, two days later, in the morning of July 29, 1890.
Vincent van Gogh
Biography of Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh received a fragmentary education: one year at the village school in Zundert, two years at a boarding school in Zevenbergen, and eighteen months at a high school in Tilburg. At sixteen he began working at the Hague gallery of the French art dealers Goupil et Cie., in which his uncle Vincent was a partner. His brother Theo, who was born 1 May 1857, later worked for the same firm. In 1873 Goupil’s transferred Vincent to London, and two years later they moved him to Paris, where he lost all ambition to become an art dealer. Instead, he immersed himself in religion, threw out his modern, worldly book, and became «daffy with piety», in the words of his sister Elisabeth. He took little interest in his work, and was dismissed from his job at the beginning of 1876.
Van Gogh then took a post as an assistant teacher in England, but, disappointed by the lack of prospects, returned to Holland at the end of the year. He now decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a clergyman. Although disturbed by his fanaticism and odd behavior, his parents agreed to pay for the private lessons he would need to gain admission to the university. This proved to be another false start. Van Gogh abandoned the lessons, and after brief training as an evangelist went to the Borinage coal-mining region in the south of Belgium. His ministry among the miners led him to identify deeply with the workers and their families. In 1897, however, his appointment was not renewed, and his parents despaired, regarding him as a social misfit. In an unguarded moment, his father even spoke of committing him to a mental asylum.
His parents could not go along with this latest change of course, and financial responsibility for Vincent passed to his brother Theo, who was now working in the Paris gallery of Boussod, Valadon et Cie., the successor to Goupil’s. It was because of Theo’s loyal support that Van Gogh later came to regard his oeuvre as the fruits of his brother’s efforts on his behalf. A lengthy correspondence between the two brothers (which began in August 1872) would continue until the last days of Vincent’s life.
When Van Gogh decided to become an artist, no one, not even himself, suspected that he had extraordinary gifts. His evolution from an inept but impassioned novice into a truly original master was remarkably rapid. He eventually proved to have an exceptional feel for bold, harmonious color effects, and an infallible instinct for choosing simple but memorable compositions.
In order to prepare for his new career, Van Gogh went to Brussels to study at the academy, but left after only nine months. There he got to know Anthon van Rappard, who was to be his most important artist friend during his Dutch period.
In April 1881, Van Gogh went to live with his parents in Etten in North Brabant, where he set himself the task of learning how to draw. He experimented endlessly with all sorts of drawing materials, and concentrated on mastering technical aspects of his craft like perspective, anatomy, and physiognomy. Most of his subjects were taken from peasant life.
At the end of 1881 he moved to The Hague, and there, too, he concentrated mainly on drawing. At first he took lessons from Anton Mauve, his cousin by marriage, but the two soon fell out, partly because Mauve was scandalized by Vincent’s relationship with Sien Hoornik, a pregnant prostitute who already had an illegitimate child. Van Gogh made a few paintings while in The Hague, but drawing was his main passion. In order to achieve his ambition of becoming a figure painter, he drew from the live model whenever he could.
In September 1883 he decided to break off the relationship with Sien and follow in the footsteps of artists like Van Rappard and Mauve by trying his luck in the picturesque eastern province of Drenthe, which was fairly inaccessible in those days. After three months, however, a lack of both drawing materials and models forced him to leave. He decided once again to move in with his parents, who were now living in the North Brabant village of Nuenen, near Eindhoven.
At the end of 1884 he began painting and drawing a major series of heads and work-roughened peasant hands in preparation for a large and complex figure piece that he was planning. In April 1885 this period of study came to fruition in the masterpiece of his Dutch period, The Potato Eaters
In the summer of that year, he made a large number of drawings of the peasants working in the fields. The supply of models dried up, however, when the local priest forbade his parishioners to pose for the vicar’s son. He turned to painting landscape instead, inspired in part by a visit to recently opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
In 1885, feeling the need for a proper artistic training, Van Gogh enrolled at the academy in Antwerp. He found the lessons rather tedious, but was greatly impressed by the city and its museums. He fell under the spell of Peter Paul Rubens’ palette and brushwork, and also discovered Japanese prints.
In early 1886 Van Gogh went to live with his brother in Paris. There, at last, he was confronted with the full impact of modern art and especially with the recent work of the Impressionists Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and postimpressionists Paul Gauguin. He discovered that the dark palette he had developed back in Holland was hopelessly out-of-date. In order to brighten it up, he began painting still lifes of flowers. The search for his own idiom led him to experiment with impressionist and postimpressionist techniques and to study the prints of Japanese masters. During his time in Paris he made friends with such artists as Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Paul Signac, and Georges Seurat. Within two years Van Gogh had come to terms with the latest development and had forged his own, highly personal style.
At the beginning of 1888, Van Gogh, now a mature artist, went south to Arles, in Provence, where he at last began to feel confident about his choice of career. He set out to make a personal contribution to modern art with his daring color combinations. He was swept away by the landscape around Arles. In the spring he painted numerous scenes of fruit trees in blossom, and in the summer the yellow wheat fields. Although he had some difficulty finding models, he did make portraits, among which were those of the Roulin family. It was typical of Van Gogh’s faith in his own abilities that he decided not to try to sell any work yet but to wait until he had thirty top-class pictures with which he could announce himself to the world. He cherished the hope that a number of other artists would come and join him in Arles, where they could all live and work together. The idea seemed to get off to a promising start when Gauguin arrived in October 1888.
Toward the end of the year, however, his optimism was rudely shattered by the first signs of his illness, a type of epilepsy that took the form of delusions and psychotic attacks. It was during one of those seizures that he cut off his left earlobe. Gauguin made a hasty departure and Van Gogh’s dreams of an artist’s colony disappeared.
In April 889 he went to nearby Saint-Remy, where he entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum as a voluntary patient. Van Gogh was unable to work where when suffering from bouts of his illness. If he felt well enough, though, he went out to draw and paint in the garden or surroundings of the asylum. His use of color, which had often been so intense in Arles, became more muted, and he tried to make his brushwork more graphic. In the closing months of the year, he had a success when two of his paintings were shown at the fifth exhibition of Societe des artistes independents.
Van Gogh also made a large number of «translations in color» of prints by some of his favorite artists, like Millet and Eugene Delacroix. He found them consoling, and they helped him keep in practice.
In January 1890 the critic Albert Aurier published an enthusiastic article about Van Gogh’s work.
The artist left Saint-Remy in May 1890 and went north again, this time to the rustic village of Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris. On his way, he stopped off in Paris to call on Theo, his wife Johanna, and their infant son Vincent Willem.
Although he now had a small but growing circle of admirers, Van Gogh had lost his original passion. He wrote to his brother:
He nevertheless continued working hard during his two months in Auvers, producing dozens of paintings and drawings. On 27 July 1890, Vincent van Gogh was shot in the stomach, and passed away in the early morning of 29 July 1890 in his room at the Auberge Ravoux in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise. Although official history maintains that Van Gogh committed suicide, the latest research reveals that Van Gogh’s death might be caused by an accident.
 |
| Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo van Gogh’s Tomb |
Today, Van Gogh is generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt.
Биография Винсента Ван Гога на английском языке
Здесь вы можете прочитать биографию Винсента Ван Гога на английском языке.
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter. His paintings are now highly valued in the world of art. He was born in the Southern Netherlands on March 30, 1853. His father was a pastor. Vincent wasn’t the only child in the family; he had two brothers and three sisters. In 1869 not even finishing the secondary school he left for Hague to work there at one large art company. In painter’s family all men somehow dealt either with religion or with art.
By the age of twenty Vincent decided to change his work area and to follow his father’s steps. He soon found pastor’s assisting job in the suburbs of London and moved there. His first sermon was held on October 29, 1876. A year later he moved back to the Netherlands to study theology at the University of Amsterdam. Time spent in London had considerably changed the artist’s life and views. Firstly, he had a good salary, so he could afford to visit various art galleries and museums. Secondly, he became a successful trader and could have an excellent career.
However, everything changed when he fell in love with his flat owner’s daughter, who had already been engaged. Facing this fact, he became indifferent to his work and to other joyful things in life. He lost his job and returned to the Netherlands. The only solace he found was religion. Having moved to Amsterdam, he began studying priesthood, but soon dropped the faculty. When he was about thirty-three Vincent moved to Paris to stay with his brother Theo.
There he got a chance to take painting lessons from F. Cormon and to meet such artists as Gauguin, Pissarro and others. He soon forgot all the misfortunes and became a recognizable and respectful artist. He largely developed the styles of impressionism and post-impressionism. At the same time he still worked as a preacher in one evangelical church. By the age of twenty-seven he knew exactly that he would dedicate his life to art. Although he took some drawing lessons, he was considered a self-taught painter, as he read lots of tutorials and had his own style.
Unfortunately, the painter’s life was soon again filled with love sufferings. This time it was his widowed cousin Kee Vos. She was also the reason why he quarreled with his father and moved to Hague. He met a woman of easy virtue there. Wishing to save her from her numerous sins, Vincent was even willing to marry her, but again his family interfered and thoughts of marriage were simply shattered. Returning to his home place he improved his drawing skills.
Soon he returned to Paris to his brother Theo, who always helped and supported him in every possible way. In fact, France for van Gogh was almost like the motherland. He spent all the rest of his life there, feeling like home. He was a person with difficult and explosive character. Some people even called him a crazy lunatic. Nevertheless he had his own friends who kept him a company. In 1888 he moved to Arles where he planned to create a settlement for artists. When he shared his idea with his friend Gauguin, they became enemies.
In the burst of anger van Gogh cut off his own left ear. After this case he was placed for two weeks in psychiatric hospital. Even after returning home he suffered from occasional hallucinations and had to re-start the treatment. In 1890 he finally left the hospital and went to Theo’s home, whose wife had just given birth to the son they named Vincent after his uncle. This peaceful happiness didn’t last. In July1890 van Gogh shot himself. The painter died in his brother’s arms, who loved him very much. Six months later his brother Theo also died and was buried next to Vincent.
Vincent van Gogh
Who Was Vincent van Gogh?
Vincent van Gogh was a post-Impressionist painter whose work — notable for its beauty, emotion and color — highly influenced 20th-century art. He struggled with mental illness and remained poor and virtually unknown throughout his life.
Early Life and Family
Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, Netherlands. Van Gogh’s father, Theodorus van Gogh, was an austere country minister, and his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus, was a moody artist whose love of nature, drawing and watercolors was transferred to her son.
Van Gogh was born exactly one year after his parents’ first son, also named Vincent, was stillborn. At a young age — with his name and birthdate already etched on his dead brother’s headstone — van Gogh was melancholy.
Theo van Gogh
The eldest of six living children, van Gogh had two younger brothers (Theo, who worked as an art dealer and supported his older brother’s art, and Cor) and three younger sisters (Anna, Elizabeth and Willemien).
Theo van Gogh would later play an important role in his older brother’s life as a confidant, supporter and art dealer.
Early Life and Education
At age 15, van Gogh’s family was struggling financially, and he was forced to leave school and go to work. He got a job at his Uncle Cornelis’ art dealership, Goupil & Cie., a firm of art dealers in The Hague. By this time, van Gogh was fluent in French, German and English, as well as his native Dutch.
In June of 1873, van Gogh was transferred to the Groupil Gallery in London. There, he fell in love with English culture. He visited art galleries in his spare time, and also became a fan of the writings of Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
He also fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Eugenie Loyer. When she rejected his marriage proposal, van Gogh suffered a breakdown. He threw away all his books except for the Bible, and devoted his life to God. He became angry with people at work, telling customers not to buy the «worthless art,» and was eventually fired.
Life as a Preacher
Van Gogh then taught in a Methodist boys’ school, and also preached to the congregation. Although raised in a religious family, it wasn’t until this time that he seriously began to consider devoting his life to the church
Hoping to become a minister, he prepared to take the entrance exam to the School of Theology in Amsterdam. After a year of studying diligently, he refused to take the Latin exams, calling Latin a «dead language» of poor people, and was subsequently denied entrance.
The same thing happened at the Church of Belgium: In the winter of 1878, van Gogh volunteered to move to an impoverished coal mine in the south of Belgium, a place where preachers were usually sent as punishment. He preached and ministered to the sick, and also drew pictures of the miners and their families, who called him «Christ of the Coal Mines.»
The evangelical committees were not as pleased. They disagreed with van Gogh’s lifestyle, which had begun to take on a tone of martyrdom. They refused to renew van Gogh’s contract, and he was forced to find another occupation.
Finding Solace in Art
In the fall of 1880, van Gogh decided to move to Brussels and become an artist. Though he had no formal art training, his brother Theo offered to support van Gogh financially.
He began taking lessons on his own, studying books like Travaux des champs by Jean-François Millet and Cours de dessin by Charles Bargue.
Van Gogh’s art helped him stay emotionally balanced. In 1885, he began work on what is considered to be his first masterpiece, «Potato Eaters.» Theo, who by this time living in Paris, believed the painting would not be well-received in the French capital, where Impressionism had become the trend.
Nevertheless, van Gogh decided to move to Paris, and showed up at Theo’s house uninvited. In March 1886, Theo welcomed his brother into his small apartment.
In Paris, van Gogh first saw Impressionist art, and he was inspired by the color and light. He began studying with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Camille Pissarro and others.
To save money, he and his friends posed for each other instead of hiring models. Van Gogh was passionate, and he argued with other painters about their works, alienating those who became tired of his bickering.
Love Life
Van Gogh’s love life was nothing short of disastrous: He was attracted to women in trouble, thinking he could help them. When he fell in love with his recently widowed cousin, Kate, she was repulsed and fled to her home in Amsterdam.
Van Gogh then moved to The Hague and fell in love with Clasina Maria Hoornik, an alcoholic prostitute. She became his companion, mistress and model.
When Hoornik went back to prostitution, van Gogh became utterly depressed. In 1882, his family threatened to cut off his money unless he left Hoornik and The Hague.
Van Gogh left in mid-September of that year to travel to Drenthe, a somewhat desolate district in the Netherlands. For the next six weeks, he lived a nomadic life, moving throughout the region while drawing and painting the landscape and its people.
Arles
Van Gogh became influenced by Japanese art and began studying Eastern philosophy to enhance his art and life. He dreamed of traveling there, but was told by Toulouse-Lautrec that the light in the village of Arles was just like the light in Japan.
In February 1888, van Gogh boarded a train to the south of France. He moved into a now-famous «yellow house» and spent his money on paint rather than food.
Paintings
Vincent van Gogh completed more than 2,100 works, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings and sketches.
‘Starry Night’
Van Gogh painted «The Starry Night» in the asylum where he was staying in Saint-Rémy, France, in 1889, the year before his death. “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” he wrote to his brother Theo.
A combination of imagination, memory, emotion and observation, the oil painting on canvas depicts an expressive swirling night sky and a sleeping village, with a large flame-like cypress, thought to represent the bridge between life and death, looming in the foreground. The painting is currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, NY.
READ NEXT
Olivia Rodrigo
Megan Thee Stallion
Bowen Yang
‘Sunflowers’
Van Gogh painted two series of sunflowers in Arles, France: four between August and September 1888 and one in January 1889; the versions and replicas are debated among art historians.
The oil paintings on canvas, which depict wilting yellow sunflowers in a vase, are now displayed at museums in London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Munich and Philadelphia.
‘Irises’
In 1889, after entering an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France, van Gogh began painting Irises, working from the plants and flowers he found in the asylum’s garden. Critics believe the painting was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints.
French critic Octave Mirbeau, the painting’s first owner and an early supporter of Van Gogh, remarked, «How well he has understood the exquisite nature of flowers!»
‘Self-Portrait’
Over the course of 10 years, van Gogh created more than 43 self-portraits as both paintings and drawings. «I am looking for a deeper likeness than that obtained by a photographer,» he wrote to his sister.
«People say, and I am willing to believe it, that it is hard to know yourself. But it is not easy to paint yourself, either. The portraits painted by Rembrandt are more than a view of nature, they are more like a revelation,” he later wrote to his brother.
Van Gogh’s self-portraits are now displayed in museums around the world, including in Washington, D.C., Paris, New York and Amsterdam.
Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait Painting Courtesy Musée d’Orsay via Wikimedia Commons
Photo: Courtesy Musée d’Orsay via Wikimedia Commons
Van Gogh’s Ear
In December 1888, van Gogh was living on coffee, bread and absinthe in Arles, France, and he found himself feeling sick and strange.
Before long, it became apparent that in addition to suffering from physical illness, his psychological health was declining. Around this time, he is known to have sipped on turpentine and eaten paint.
His brother Theo was worried, and he offered Paul Gauguin money to go watch over Vincent in Arles. Within a month, van Gogh and Gauguin were arguing constantly, and one night, Gauguin walked out. Van Gogh followed him, and when Gauguin turned around, he saw van Gogh holding a razor in his hand.
Hours later, van Gogh went to the local brothel and paid for a prostitute named Rachel. With blood pouring from his hand, he offered her his ear, asking her to «keep this object carefully.»
The police found van Gogh in his room the next morning, and admitted him to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital. Theo arrived on Christmas Day to see van Gogh, who was weak from blood loss and having violent seizures.
The doctors assured Theo that his brother would live and would be taken good care of, and on January 7, 1889, van Gogh was released from the hospital.
He remained, however, alone and depressed. For hope, he turned to painting and nature, but could not find peace and was hospitalized again. He would paint at the yellow house during the day and return to the hospital at night.
Asylum
Van Gogh decided to move to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence after the people of Arles signed a petition saying that he was dangerous.
On May 8, 1889, he began painting in the hospital gardens. In November 1889, he was invited to exhibit his paintings in Brussels. He sent six paintings, including «Irises» and «Starry Night.»
On January 31, 1890, Theo and his wife, Johanna, gave birth to a boy and named him Vincent Willem van Gogh after Theo’s brother. Around this time, Theo sold van Gogh’s «The Red Vineyards» painting for 400 francs.
Also around this time, Dr. Paul Gachet, who lived in Auvers, about 20 miles north of Paris, agreed to take van Gogh as his patient. Van Gogh moved to Auvers and rented a room.
Death
On July 27, 1890, Vincent van Gogh went out to paint in the morning carrying a loaded pistol and shot himself in the chest, but the bullet did not kill him. He was found bleeding in his room.
Van Gogh was distraught about his future because, in May of that year, his brother Theo had visited and spoke to him about needing to be stricter with his finances. Van Gogh took that to mean Theo was no longer interested in selling his art.
Van Gogh was taken to a nearby hospital and his doctors sent for Theo, who arrived to find his brother sitting up in bed and smoking a pipe. They spent the next couple of days talking together, and then van Gogh asked Theo to take him home.
On July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh died in the arms of his brother Theo. He was only 37 years old.
Theo, who was suffering from syphilis and weakened by his brother’s death, died six months after his brother in a Dutch asylum. He was buried in Utrecht, but in 1914 Theo’s wife, Johanna, who was a dedicated supporter of van Gogh’s works, had Theo’s body reburied in the Auvers cemetery next to Vincent.
Legacy
Theo’s wife Johanna then collected as many of van Gogh’s paintings as she could, but discovered that many had been destroyed or lost, as van Gogh’s own mother had thrown away crates full of his art.
On March 17, 1901, 71 of van Gogh’s paintings were displayed at a show in Paris, and his fame grew enormously. His mother lived long enough to see her son hailed as an artistic genius. Today, Vincent van Gogh is considered one of the greatest artists in human history.
Van Gogh Museum
In 1973, the Van Gogh Museum opened its doors in Amsterdam to make the works of Vincent van Gogh accessible to the public. The museum houses more than 200 van Gogh paintings, 500 drawings and 750 written documents including letters to Vincent’s brother Theo. It features self-portraits, “The Potato Eaters,” “The Bedroom” and “Sunflowers.”