Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was born in the Dutch village of Groot-Zundert in 1853, the son of a pastor. He came to painting late and without training, and for most of his short working life he sold almost nothing.

In the south of France the light undid him and remade him. In Arles and Saint-Remy he painted wheat fields, orchards, cypresses and the night sky in thick bright strokes, often finishing a whole canvas in a single day.

He wrote hundreds of letters to his brother Theo, who believed in him when no one else would. Vincent died at Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, thirty-seven years old, with the paint on his last canvases barely dry.

A tribute, kept by Here After All.

The work they left

Some nine hundred paintings in ten years, almost all in the last five: The Starry Night over Saint-Remy, the Sunflowers painted to welcome Gauguin to Arles, The Potato Eaters, the Bedroom, Cafe Terrace at Night, Irises, and the late Wheatfield with Crows. He sold almost nothing while he lived.

The letters to his brother Theo, more than six hundred of them, form one of the great documents of any artist's mind: the color theories, the doubt, the tenderness, all in the same hand that loaded the brush.