Vincent Willem Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Zundert, a village in the south of the Netherlands. His father was the protestant minister of the place, but three of his father's brothers were art dealers, and so it is only natural that Vincent became an apprentice at the shop of his uncle Vincent van Gogh in The Hague. His uncle had become a partner in the firm of Goupil & Cie, and after having worked in The Hague for four years Vincent was sent to other branches of the Goupil firm, first in London, then in Paris.

During the years in London and Paris, Vincent had developed an intense love for the Church and a desire to follow in the footsteps of his father. In England he found a job as a schoolmaster. Back in Holland, he finally got permission from his father and his influential uncles to start the long study to become a clergyman. From 1877 to 1878, he stayed in the house of his uncle Jan, a high-ranking naval officer in Amsterdam, taking lessons in Latin and Greek and mathematics in order to prepare himself for the entrance examination of the University, but that kind of study soon became too much for him; he wanted to bring his religious ideas into practice as soon as possible, and finally, with the reluctant help of his father, he found a job as an evangelist in a poor mining district in Belgium, the Borinage. Here, he could live up to his ideals, and his first letters from the Borinage show that he liked his work. He gave Bible classes, taught the children of the miners, and did his utmost to help the poor, the sick, and the wounded. He gave away his best clothes and for some time lived in a miserable hut. His fanaticism was probably the cause that after six months the Evangelisation Committee did not renew his appointment. For some time he tried to go on with his social work, living on the little money his father sent him, but at the same time his interest had shifted to art again and he became more preoccupied with his drawing than with the Church. In April 1881, after a year of struggling with himself in poverty and isolation, he returned to the home of his parents, who had by now settled in Etten, another village in the province of Brabant, and it was here that his career as a professional artist really begun.

Although for more than a year Van Gogh had been making drawings of miners and other sketches (of which only very few have been preserved) and had practiced drawing by making large copies of works by Millet and by repeatedly copying the Exercises au Fusain by Charles Bargue, a drawing manual published by Goupil, he was almost a complete beginner when he started work in Etten. His first drawings from Etten are still very clumsy, but in a few months a great improvement is noticeable, and the progress becomes amazing as soon as he had settled in The Hague (after a row with his father about his refusal to go to church at Christmas). Here he had some help from a very good painter, called Anton Mauve, who also gave him some painting lessons. In the two years that Van Gogh spent in The Hague (1882-83), he produced some two hundred drawings, most of which are very characteristic figure studies, either after the woman who shared his life in The Hague, Sien Hoornik, or after men and women from an old people's home, but there are also excellent landscapes, such as the views of the gardens and meadows behind his house. One of the most famous of his figure studies is the seated nude, titled Sorrow, for which Sien had sat as a model. This portrait, of which he also made a lithograph, is typical for what his ideal in drawing was; he wanted to achieve more than mere technical perfection: his real aim was expression. He wanted to express the misery of the poor people with whom he was surrounded, and also their dignity. He admired the wood engravings of The Graphic, buying and collecting as many as he could, especially its "Heads of the People," though not its "Types of Beauty."

As life had become unbearable with her, he left Sien and her two children behind in September 1883, to find some rest and new inspiration in Drenthe, one of the northern provinces of the Netherlands. It was cold and lonely in Drenthe, and what he could achieve there were only a few dark and sombre landscape paintings and a small number of drawings, although he found an outlet in writing many long letters to his brother, who had gone on supporting him financially in spite of his disapproval of his relationship with Sien. Two happier and more productive years followed as Van Gogh was allowed to stay and work in the house of his parents again, who had moved to Neunen in the meantime, a town near Eindhoven (1884-85). Here he developed into a really great painter, while the numerous monumental drawings he made of farmers and peasant women working in the fields are not inferior to those of his reverend master Millet. Again, to be expressive was his main concern even if it was at the cost of correctness. Sending some of the drawings to Theo, he asked him to show them to a French painter, adding, "Tell him that my great longing is to learn to make those very incorrectnesses, those deviations, remodellings, changes in reality, so that they may become, yes, lies if you like--but truer than the literal truth." It was with this same concern for reality in a reinforced form that he painted what is often considered to be his masterpiece of the Nuenen-period: The Potato-Eaters, a group of peasant people gathered round their common meal, a picture which suggested, as he said, "that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish." At the end of 1885, shortly after his father had died, Van Gogh left Holland, never to return, and an important painting that can be seen as a symbolic farewell to that country and to his so-called "dark period" is the still-life with an open bible--representing the world of his father--in front of which is placed a French novel with yellow cover, Zola's La Joie de vivre--representing his own world and the world of color, light and freedom towards which he