Art History 2020
Term Paper
Van Gogh van Gogh
A Self-Taught Master
Vincent Willem van Gogh a self-taught artist who changed the landscape of Post-impressionism forever. Vincent was born in the Netherlands on March 30, 1853. Van Gogh’s was the oldest of five children of Theodorus van Gogh and Anna Cornelia Carbentus. As a young man he showed early signs of solitude from friends and family. He attended school, which he did not study art, but exceled in the sciences. After school Van Gogh worked for as a junior clerk at an art firm. This is where Van Gogh took up his interest in art at the age of twenty-seven. He was largely self-taught. He started with doodling’s on scrap paper and then moved to copying prints and studying drawings. At this time of Van Gogh’s life he was truly a student of the world of art. He studied many artists, but Jean-Francois Millet is to be considered his favorite. He wanted to hone his skills and left the Netherlands for Paris and then France. Van Gogh suffered from many mental breakdowns and did sometime in a mental hospital. It is estimated that Van Gogh did over nine hundred paintings and drawings. On July 29, 1890 Van Gogh died due a self-inflected gunshot to his chest. In typical art fashion his works of art begun to attract critical attention after his death. Van Gogh’s whole life was interesting to say the least, but he was a very eccentric artist for his time.
Van Gogh was born in on March 30, 1853 in the town of Groot-Zundert in Brabant, a region of The Netherlands. His father was a minister and his mother was a bookseller’s daughter. Van Gogh was born exactly one year after his parent’s first child, which was named Vincent and was a stillborn. His stillborn brother had some psychological struggles on Van Gogh. He suffered and struggled as the “…replacement child…” for his parents (Naifeh). He had five siblings Cornelius, Anna, Elisabeth, Willemina, and Theodorus, who was his favorite,...