Vincent Van Gogh: One of The Most Famous Artists

If one was to ask someone to name five artist off of the top of their head, they are destined to get Van Gogh as one of their answers in the response of that person. Even though he remained poor and and almost anonymous for most of his life, he is still considered one of the greatest artist of all time.

Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands. He struggled with mental illness for all of his life, before dying. Gogh was thirty seven at the time of his death. He was a Dutch post-impressionist painter and was known for his use of color and the express of emotions in his paintings. It is estimated that over his lifetime that he created around 2,100 pieces of art. He was birthed into a somewhat wealthy family, and when he got older, he actually worked as an art dealer. He was a very religious man, and was a member of the protestant religion.

By the time Gogh was a teenager, his family began to financially struggle, leading him to have to leave school and become an art dealer. He became fluent in many languages such as English, French, and German. When he was relocated to London, we grew to love the English culture, and visited many many art galleries. Although he fell in love with a woman, she did not love him back, and even denied his marriage proposal, causing him to have a mental breakdown. He was later fired from his job for influencing the customers to not buy the worthless artwork. He later taught at an all boys schools and hoped to be a minister one day. After a year of studying for the entrance test, he was rejected. He tried once again to be a minister elsewhere, but once again was rejected and failed.

Van Gogh endured delusions and psychotic episodes. Although he was in fact concerned about his mental health, that did not stop him from heavily drinking and not eating the way that he should. At times, he even ate paint. Believe it or not, he actually cut his own ear off with a razor. After a heated argument with a friend, the anger got the best of him and he cut his ear off. The next morning he was admitted to a hospital and was very weak from all of the blood that he had lost. After being released from the hospital, he turned to painting as stress reliever. When he could not deal with the depression any longer, he was once again admitted into a mental facility, where he would paint during the day and go to the hospital at night.

Over his career, he had several very well known painting. Some of those paintings include Potato Eaters, Self Portrait, and The Starry Night. Not being all, obviously, but those are just a few of his most famous artworks. The Painting “The Potato Eaters”, is known as one of Van Gogh’s first masterpieces. The painting is a picture of five people setting around a table eating potatoes. He wanted it to seem as if they just had a different way of life than we do, and that they earned their food. He considered this painting his most successful piece of artwork. Another one of his most famous artworks is “Self Portrait.” Self Portrait is exactly what the name of it means, a self portrait of himself. In the portrait, he is looking away and his reddish beard and hair are very noticable, along with his bluish green eyes. The background of the portrait is in blue, and has thick strokes going different ways.

The strokes of blue seem to get darker as they get closer to his person. It is said that he painted around about 36 self portraits of himself during his career. Most artist paint self portraits as seeing the achievement in themselves. Finally, the painting, The Starry Night. Painted in 1889, it is arguably his most famous painting. It is indeed a masterpiece in itself. He painted the painting from his room in the mental hospital after the ear event. The view one can see in the painting is the view that he saw out of one of the windows in his room in one of the Mental Hospitals that he attended, with the add on of a village at the bottom. One of the most recognizable things about the painting is the moon in the top right corner. There are several different meanings to the table, and just about everyone has a different meaning for the famous painting. Even though most of everyone knows about the painting, at the time of his death, Van Gogh considered it a failure.

Vincent Willem Van Gogh is one of the best, and most famous, not only painter, but artists of all time. He created around 2,100 pieces of artworks, most coming in the last two years of his life. Throughout the length of his life, Gogh was seen as a failure as an artist, and as a person in the eyes as some. As we all know now, he is a great accomplished artist, and he made himself that. In fact, he even has a museum dedicated to him that opened in 1973 and has the most of his pieces of art works, located in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He struggled with mental illness in his life, even cutting his own ear off one time. His life ended in the arms of his beloved brother, Theo, who supported him financially at times in his life, days after shooting himself in the chest. The popularity of his paintings did not come until after his death, and now has arguably the most recognizable painting in the world, known as, “The Starry Night.” No matter the amount of success he gained during the time of his living, Vincent Van Gogh will forever live on as one of the art legends. He should be very proud of himself now to see where he stands in the art world.

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