Van Gogh Report

Van Gogh Report

Vincent Willem van Gogh is born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, in the south of the Netherlands. Four years later, in 1857, Vincent's brother, Theodorus (Theo), is born. At the age of 16, in July 1869, Vincent started an apprenticeship at Goupil & Cie, international art dealers with headquarters in Paris. In June 1873, Vincent is moved to Goupil in London. Vincent still continues to work on his art daily. He admires the realistic paintings of peasant life by Jean-FranÐ"§ois Millet and Jules Breton. Gradually Vincent loses interest in his work and turns to the Bible. When he is refused admittance in theology school, Vincent briefly enters a missionary school near Brussels and in December 1878 leaves for the Borinage, a coal-mining area in southern Belgium, to work as a lay preacher. Vincent identifies with the miners, sleeping on the floor and giving away his belongings. His extreme commitment draws disfavour from the church and he is dismissed. At his parents' house in Etten, he refines his drawing techniques. Vincent leaves at the end of 1881 to rent a studio in La Hague. Vincent makes his first independent watercolour and painted studies in the summer of 1882. January 1886, Vincent enrolls in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Antwerp but he withdraws within two months. In early 1886, Vincent moves in with Theo in Montmartre. He begins to meet the city's modern artists, including Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Camille Pissarro. Vincent's Paris work is an effort to assimilate the influences around him; his palette becomes brighter, his brushwork more broken. Like the Impressionists, Vincent takes his subjects from the city's cafÐ"©s and boulevards, and the open countryside along the Seine River. In early 1888, Vincent leaves for Provence in the south of France, he buys a house in Arles and invites fellow artist Paul Gauguin to join him. Personal tensions grow between the two men. In December, Vincent experiences a psychotic episode in which he threatens Gauguin with a razor and later cuts off a piece of his own left ear. He is admitted to a hospital in Arles and stays there through January of 1889. Theo, in Paris, marries Johanna Bonger in the spring. After his discharge from the hospital in Arles, he voluntarily admits himself to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-RÐ"©my, 15 miles from Arles. He attributes his breakdown to excessive alcohol