Vincent Van Gogh: biography and interesting information

Vincent Van Gogh 

He was born on 30 March  1853 in Zundert, Netherlands. Was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous artist in Western art history. In ten years he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings most of which date from the last two years of his life. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at the age of thirty seven.

                                     Biography 

Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born on 30 March 1853 in Groot-Zundert , in the predominantly Catholic province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. He was the oldest surviving child of Theodorus Van Gogh, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, and his wife Anna Cornelia Carbentus. Van Gogh was given the name of his grandfather and of a brother stillborn exactly a year before his birth.  Vincent was a common name in the Van Gogh family. The name had been born by his father, the prominent art dealer Vincent, and a theology graduate at the University of Leiden in 1811. This Vincent had 6 sons, three of them became art dealers,and May have been named after his great uncle , a sculptor (1729-1802).

Van Gogh’s mother came from a prosperous family in The Hague, and his father was the youngest son of  a minister. The two met when Anna’s younger sister Cornelia , married Theodorus’s older brother Vincent.  Van Gogh’s parents married in May 1851 and moved to Zundert.  His brother Theo was born on 1 May 1857. These were another brother Cor and three sisters: Elisabeth, Anna, Willemina (known as “Wil”). In later life Van Gogh remained in touch only with  Willemina and Theo. Van Gogh’s mother was a very religious person  and he teacheated all children to be very religious (but only Vincent changed his mind in Protestantism). 

                                        Marriage

Van Gogh was very unlucky in love . In early 1880 when he only started his career as an artist and living with his parents he fell in love with his widowed cousin ( he can’t have a marriage with her because his mother was fanatically religious).

                             Biography (continue)

Vincent was a very serious and thoughtful child. He studied at home by his mother and a governess and in 1860 was sent to the village school. In 1864 he was placed in a boarding school at Zevenberg, where he felt abandoned and he campaigned to come home. Instead in 1866 his parents sent him to middle school in Tillburg, where he was deeply unhappy. His interest in art began at a young age. He was encouraged to draw as  a child by his mother and his early drawings are expensive but don’t approach the intensity of his later work. Constant Cornelis Huijsmans who had been a successful artist, taught the students in Tilburg.

To support his religious conviction and his desire to become a pastor in 1877 the family sent him to live with uncle John Stricker, a respected theologian in Amsterdam. Van Gogh prepared for the University of Amsterdam theology examination , but he felt the exam.

                                         Van Gogh’s ear.

Vincent van Gogh’s ear has been an object of fascination for years, leading historians to come up with all sorts of different theories about why exactly the 19th century Dutch artist cut off a piece of his own auditory organ.

The most widely accepted account is that Van Gogh cut off his ear lobe in a fit of mania after getting in a fight with fellow artist Paul Gauguin.

But Merton Bailey a British Van Gogh specialist argues in a his new book “Studio of the South m Van Gogh in Provence” rhapsody Van Gogh sliced off his ear with a razor blade after  learning a pice of news about that his brother Theo was engaged.

However, historians previously believed that Van Gogh only learned about the marriage after he cut off his ear, since the first record of the mentioning the union is a letter dated Jan 19, a month after the incident. That’s why the row with Gauguin was generally considered the trigger: the French artist threatened to leave his artistic collaborator and flatmate for good, and on the same day cut off his ear.

 The new evidence suggests that Van Gogh learned about the news of his brother’s marriage on the same day as the ear mutilation and the fight with Gauguin, and therefore makes for a more probable emotional trigger.”It was fear that pulled the trigger and led to the breakdown,” Bailey told CNN. “Fear of being abandoned in both an emotional and financial way”.