Vincent van Gogh:

• Occupation: Artist, Painter
• Born: March 30, 1853 in Zundert, Netherlands
• Died: July 29, 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France age 37
• Famous works: Starry Night, The Bedroom, Irises, Sunflowers
• Style/Period: Post-impressionist, Modern Art

Interesting Facts about Vincent van Gogh
 

• He would get so obsessed with painting that he often wouldn't eat. He had poor health as a result.
• Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese prints and woodcuts which he studied intensely.
• Some people think that he may have only sold one work during his lifetime. It was called The Red Vineyard.
• His brother Theo died six months after Vincent and was buried next to him.
• In some of his self portraits his ear is bandaged from when he cut it. It looks like his right ear in the pictures because he was using a mirror to paint himself.
• You can see the painting Starry Night at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Sunflowers:

Van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers are among his most famous. He did them in Arles, in the south of France, in 1888 and 1889. Vincent painted a total of five large canvases with sunflowers in a vase, with three shades of yellow ‘and nothing else’. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour, without any loss of eloquence.

The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh: they communicated ‘gratitude’, he wrote. He hung the first two in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House. Gauguin was impressed by the sunflowers, which he thought were ‘completely Vincent’. Van Gogh had already painted a new version during his friend’s stay and Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, which Vincent was reluctant to give him. He later produced two loose copies, however, one of which is now in the Van Gogh Museum.