Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter whose work became central to the development of modern art. Born in 1853 in the village of Groot-Zundert, he worked as an art dealer, teacher, and lay preacher before committing himself to painting around 1880. Largely self-taught, he produced roughly two thousand works — among them landscapes, still lifes, and portraits — in barely a decade, the majority in his final two years in southern France. His intense color and expressive brushwork drew little commercial success during his lifetime. He died in 1890 at Auvers-sur-Oise at the age of thirty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.