Vincent Willem van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853–1890) discovered his artistic calling only in the final decade of his thirty-seven years. Supported with boundless devotion by his art-dealer brother Theo van Gogh, Vincent began with dark, earthy depictions of Dutch peasants (such as The Potato Eaters, 1885). Moving to Paris and then Arles in Provence in 1888, his palette exploded into blazing yellows, cobalt blues, and feverish light.

Van Gogh used color not to copy nature, but to express overwhelming human emotion and spiritual longing. Confined in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy in 1889, he painted his transcendent cosmic masterpiece The Starry Night, with its swirling nebulae, incandescent stars, and reach-for-the-heavens cypress tree. Producing over 2,100 artworks in ten years while selling only a single painting in his lifetime, Van Gogh became the world's most beloved symbol of creative martyrdom.