Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, a teacher and a lay preacher before taking up painting seriously at twenty-seven. Everything he is known for was made in the ten years that followed — roughly 2,100 works, about 860 of them oil paintings, and the majority of those in his final two years.

He collected Japanese prints and copied several in oil, including two by Hiroshige, and the flattened space and strong outline he took from them runs through the late work. He wrote constantly to his brother Theo, who supported him financially throughout, and those letters are why more is known about his intentions than almost any other painter of the period.

He died at thirty-seven, largely unsold.

Biography compiled from the artist's Wikidata entity and English Wikipedia article (linked above). Work-level facts — title, date, medium, dimensions, inscriptions, provenance — come from the catalogue record of the institution holding each print, cited on the individual work. Public domain status is asserted by the holding institution; Australian copyright independently verified as life + 70 years from the artist's Wikidata death date. Wikipedia ↗