GOGH, Vincent Willem van

(1853–1890)

   Painter. In the 1880s, van Gogh worked in his native province of Northern Bra bant, and in Drenthe, and later in Paris and Arles, France. As a painter, van Gogh was fundamentally self-taught. Very poor himself, he lived with the poor, for instance, with the coal miners in Borinage, Belgium, or the land laborers in his native province of Brabant. His social commitment inspired his dark realism. Later on, while living as a kind of mentally ill person in the bright south of France, van Gogh changed his style of painting into a luminous Impressionism. He worked as if possessed, finishing hundreds of paintings. His early death was supposedly a consequence of an attempt at suicide. World famous as a painter, van Gogh also wrote many letters to his friend, painter Willem van Rappard (1858–1892), and especially to his brother Theo van Gogh (1857–1891), an art dealer in Paris. The let ters are of great historical, artistic, and human interest. The biggest collections of his works are now in the Netherlands, at the Kroller Muller Museum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.