11 Things You Didn’t Know About Vincent Van Gogh

Abhishek Kumar

Knowledge can be gained at any age. After having a detailed study on topics there are things unknown to us. So, we at Abirpothi present before you the lesser-known facts about artists around the world.

Vincent Van Gogh

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most famous post-impressionist painters in the world. Over 2,100 pieces of art, 860 of which were oil paintings, were produced by him throughout his lifetime. He battled depression his entire life and never really achieved success. After committing suicide, Van Gogh gained enormous fame and is now regarded as one of the most important artists in Western art. His use of vibrant colours and expressive brushstrokes in his artwork served as an inspiration to many other painters all around the world.

Vincent Van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in the town of Zundert in the North-Brabant province of The Netherlands to Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Although his parents had named him after his paternal grandpa, the name had actually been chosen for an elder sibling who had passed away in delivery a year before his birth. Van Gogh didn’t begin painting until he was 27 years old. It’s never too late to pursue your dreams, as seen by the work of this renowned painter! Van Gogh started his creative career after several unsuccessful career efforts.

Once he dreamt of setting up a “studio of the south” to collaborate with other painters. He thus rented a yellow house in 2 places Lamartine and used the ground floor as a studio. His bedroom and one guest room were located upstairs. The colour yellow became the hallmark of his work during his time in Arles. Unfortunately, the house no longer exists as it was bombed during the war.

Vincent van Gogh is remembered for his vibrant colours, expressive brushstrokes, and curved figures as well as the turbulence in his personal life. Van Gogh has been mythologized in the public consciousness as the archetypal tortured artist, in part because of his copious published writings. Much of Van Gogh\’s posthumous success can be ascribed to Johanna, the wife of his brother Theo, who dedicated herself to carrying on his legacy after his death.

11 lesser-known facts about Vincent Van Gogh

1. Being passionate as an artist, he didn’t wait for anyone to serve as a model for his portraits, so he sketched more than 20 self-portraits for the sake of exploring new painting skills.
2. Starry Night; the best work of Van Gogh was painted by him in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, while he was admitted there as a neurological disorder patient.
3. Van Gogh made 900 paintings during a decade-long bloom of his artistic career i.e., 1881-1890. But out of his 900 paintings, only one was sold in a Les XX exhibition in 1890, in Brussels.

   

4. Before painting, he tried his hand at many other careers such as an art dealer, school teacher, and preacher. He had little success in any of these areas and announced himself as an artist in a letter to Theo in 1880.
5. How he lost his ear remains an unsolved mystery, but the main hypothesis is that he accidentally cut it himself during a fight with his friend Paul Gauguin.
6. Vincent van Gogh was in love with his widowed cousin Kee Vos, whom he persistently courted. Despite her unrequited feelings, van Gogh kept up his advances and turned the whole family against him.

   

7. When Van Gogh first began painting, he used peasants as models. He would later paint flowers, landscapes and himself, mostly because he was too poor to pay the models.
8. In his beginnings, he painted models that posed for him, but due to financial problems, he had to continue his career making self-portraits and drawing landscapes.
9. In his works, the painter used to represent the complex mathematical concept of turbulence, still unresolved.
10. Out of all the paintings he painted, Six paintings were burned in a fire, 85 were lost and three were stolen and never recovered.
11. The colour of his paintings is disappearing because of the exposition to UV rays. Paint restorers are reading his letters in order to recover the original colours.