GOGH, VINCENT VAN (1853-189o), Dutch painter of the Post-Impressionist movement. He was born on March 3, 1853, at in Brabant, Holland, where his father was Calvinist pastor. At the age of 16 he worked in the firm of his uncle, a picture dealer at The Hague, and was later employed with Goupil and company in Paris and in London. In 1876 he was art teacher in Ramsgate, and then determined to follow the religious vocation. In 1877 he returned to Holland to study theology at Amsterdam. Imbued with ideals of Christian com munism, and seeking practical work, he went to live among the miners at Wasmes, in the Borinage. There he spent his free time in drawing. In 188o he went to Brussels to take up the study of painting, and then spent some years in his father's home in the village of Neunen, painting the simple life of the peasants, the moorland and still life. His chief work of this period is "The Potato Eaters" (1885), a group of labourers sitting round a table, under a lamp, painted in heavy brown tones and displaying the hardship and ugliness of proletarian life. Six lithographs of like subjects, of which only a few impressions are extant, were also executed at this time. He took some lessons from Mauve, who was his cousin. In 1885 he studied at the Academy at Antwerp, and a year later joined his brother, Theo, in Paris. At the studio of Cormon he met Emile Bernard, Anquetin and Toulouse Lautrec, and joined in their revolt against slavish copying of nature. Through his brother, who was employed at Goupil, he was introduced to the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist school, and he was persuaded to remove the browns and umbers from his palette and to paint with the clear, bright colours, and in the luminous divisionist technique of Seurat. He studied Japanese prints, and the works of Delacroix and Monticelli. "The Res taurant on Montmartre" (Luxembourg museum) was the first canvas painted in this luminous key. The portraits of the colour man, Tanguy (1887) (example at the Rodin museum), show his more developed style. But only few works of his Parisian period have survived, and of the mural decoration of the cafe Tambourin only fragments remain. After two years in Paris he longed to go south, and in Feb. 1888, with the financial aid of his brother, he settled at Arles, in Provence. There he painted the blossoming fruit trees, the fields bathed in sunlight, the cypresses and sun flowers, his simple room, his rustic chair, and his own portrait with keen and restless blue eyes and abnormal skull. His models were the postman and his family, the innkeeper's wife ("L'Arle sienne") and the "Berceuse." Colour seemed to him vital; he revelled in it, using it thick and pure, in long and nervous brush strokes: "I am thinking of decorating my studio with half-a-dozen sunflowers," he wrote to his brother, "it will be a decorative effect in which the glaring or broken tones of chromes will stand out vividly against a background of variegated blue, ranging from the most delicate emerald green to royal blue, enclosed in narrow strips of golden yellow. It will produce the sort of effect that Gothic church windows do." He tried to render the very texture of things. His technique was not scientific and calculated, like that of Seurat, but almost barbaric in its display of intense emotion. In October, Gauguin, whom he had befriended in Paris, arrived in response to his pressing invitation. The two worked for a while together; but soon Van Gogh's nerves gave way, under mined by privation and strain and by undue exposure to the sun. One day he threatened his friend with a knife, and then, repentant, cut off his own ear. He was brought to the hospital, and though dismissed after a fortnight, had to be interned again in Feb. 1889. The remainder of his life was passed under the shadow of insanity, though all the time he continued to paint. He was moved to St. Remy, and in May 1890 to Auvers-sur-Oise, under the care of Dr. Gachet, whose portrait he painted (Frankfurt museum). His last work was the "Mairie au 14 juillet," a picture full of sunlight. He shot himself, and died on July 29, 189o.
During his lifetime the only one who believed in his art and who helped him was his brother. Van Gogh's letters to him, dated from 1872 to his death, are moving documents describing his aims and his work.
See Maurice Denis, De Gauguin et de van Gogh an Classicisme (Occi dent XV., 1909) ; T. Duret, Vincent v. Gogh (1916) ; J. Meier-Graefe, V. v. Gogh (Eng. trans., 1928) . Van Gogh's letters were first published in the Mercure de France . Since then they have appeared in English translation. Letters of a Post-Impressionist (1912) ; The Letters of V. v. Gogh to his Brother (1872-,86) with a Memoir by his Sister-in-Law, J. v. Gogh-Bonger (1927) ; Letters of V. v. Gogh to his Brother (1929) ; I. Stone, Lust for Life (fiction). (I. A. R.)