Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh came to painting late and worked for only about ten years. Before that he had tried being an art dealer, a teacher, a bookshop clerk and a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Borinage in Belgium, and he left or was dismissed from every one of them. He picked up the brush seriously around the age of 27, and everything we think of as Van Gogh fits into a single decade.

For almost all of it he was kept alive by his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris. Theo sent money and paints and got letters back, hundreds of them, in which Vincent talked through every picture he was making. The early canvases were dark and peasant, like The Potato Eaters. Then came Paris, the Impressionists, and a palette that suddenly caught fire with colour.

In 1888 he went south to Arles and dreamed of gathering a small colony of painters around him. Paul Gauguin answered the call, but two difficult men living together fell apart fast, and it ended on the December night Van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. After that came the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he painted The Starry Night, and the town of Auvers-sur-Oise under the eye of Doctor Gachet. In the summer of 1890, at 37, he shot himself in the chest and died two days later.

Almost no one bought his work while he lived. In that one decade he left more than 2,000 pieces, around 860 of them oil paintings, and sold only a handful. Theo outlived him by just six months. What finally made Van Gogh famous was Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who spent years arranging exhibitions and was the first to publish his letters.