Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime. He spent just ten years as an artist before his death at age 37. And yet, in that brief, turbulent decade, he produced roughly 2,100 artworks — including around 860 oil paintings — that would reshape the entire trajectory of Western art. His swirling skies, blazing sunflowers, and emotionally charged landscapes did something no painter before him had quite achieved: they made the canvas feel like it was alive with the artist's own nervous energy.
Van Gogh's story is often reduced to a tragic narrative of madness and genius. The severed ear, the asylum, the suicide — these biographical details have become so famous that they sometimes overshadow the actual paintings. That is a shame, because the work itself is extraordinary on purely visual terms. Van Gogh developed a painting technique so distinctive that you can identify his hand from across a gallery room. Those thick, rhythmic brushstrokes are not the product of uncontrolled emotion — they are the result of intense study, relentless experimentation, and a deep understanding of color theory.
This profile traces Van Gogh's artistic journey from his early dark Dutch paintings through his explosion of color in France, examining the techniques, influences, and masterworks that made him one of the most important artists in history.
Early Life and the Path to Art
Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a small village in the southern Netherlands. His father was a Protestant minister, and the Van Gogh family had deep connections to both the church and the art trade — three of Vincent's uncles were art dealers, and his brother Theo would become one as well.
Before becoming an artist, Van Gogh tried several careers and failed at all of them. He worked as an art dealer at Goupil & Cie in The Hague, London, and Paris from 1869 to 1876, but was dismissed for lack of enthusiasm for selling. He briefly taught school in England, then attempted to become a minister like his father. He studied theology in Amsterdam and later worked as a missionary in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium, where he lived in such extreme poverty alongside the miners that the church authorities dismissed him for being "too zealous."
Vincent van Gogh, "The Starry Night" (1889), oil on canvas, 73.7 × 92.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Painted from his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
It was during this period of personal crisis, around 1880, that Van Gogh decided to become an artist. He was 27 years old — a late start by any standard. He began by drawing, studying anatomy and perspective with fierce determination. His early sketches of miners, peasants, and laborers show a raw talent for capturing human dignity in difficult circumstances.
The Dutch Period: Dark Earth and Working People
Van Gogh's earliest paintings, created between 1881 and 1885 while living in the Netherlands, look nothing like the vibrant works most people associate with his name. These are dark, somber pictures painted in earthy browns, deep greens, and muddy ochres. The subjects are peasants — people digging potatoes, weaving at looms, eating simple meals by lamplight.
The masterpiece of this period is "The Potato Eaters" (1885), which shows five peasants sharing a meal of potatoes and coffee in a dimly lit room. Van Gogh deliberately made the figures rough and unglamorous. He wrote to Theo: "I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish." The painting was influenced by the social realism of Jean-François Millet and the dark palette of Rembrandt.
Vincent van Gogh, "The Potato Eaters" (1885), oil on canvas, 82 × 114 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Van Gogh considered this his first real masterpiece. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
While these early works lack the color fireworks of his later paintings, they reveal something essential about Van Gogh: his deep empathy for ordinary people and his willingness to sacrifice conventional beauty for emotional truth. These qualities would remain central to his art even as his palette exploded with color.
Paris and the Discovery of Color (1886–1888)
Everything changed when Van Gogh moved to Paris in February 1886 to live with his brother Theo, who was working as an art dealer. In Paris, Vincent encountered Impressionism for the first time — and it hit him like a thunderbolt.
He studied the bright palettes of Monet and Renoir, the pointillist technique of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, and the bold flat colors of Japanese woodblock prints, which were hugely fashionable in Paris at the time. Within months, his palette shifted dramatically. The dark Dutch browns gave way to vivid blues, yellows, greens, and oranges. He began experimenting with complementary color contrasts — placing red against green, orange against blue — to create maximum visual intensity.
Van Gogh also befriended several important artists during his two years in Paris, including Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Signac. These relationships pushed him to experiment further, but Paris also exhausted him. The city's pace, the drinking, the arguments — Van Gogh needed somewhere quieter to develop his vision.
Arles: The Explosion of Genius (1888–1889)
In February 1888, Van Gogh boarded a train south to Arles, in Provence. He arrived to find snow on the ground, but within weeks the almond trees were blooming and the landscape was flooded with Mediterranean light. Van Gogh was electrified. Over the next fifteen months, he would produce some of the most iconic paintings in art history at a pace that borders on superhuman — sometimes completing a painting a day.
The Arles period gave us "Sunflowers" (1888), a series of still lifes that Van Gogh painted to decorate the Yellow House, where he hoped to establish an artists' colony. The sunflower paintings are exercises in yellow — chrome yellow, cadmium yellow, yellow ochre — set against backgrounds of pale blue or royal blue. Van Gogh applied the paint thickly, using a technique called impasto, so that the petals seem to project physically from the canvas surface.
This period also produced "The Night Café" (1888), "Bedroom in Arles" (1888), "Starry Night Over the Rhône" (1888), and the series of portraits including "The Postman Joseph Roulin". In each of these works, Van Gogh pushed color beyond naturalistic description into the realm of pure emotion. The red and green of "The Night Café" are deliberately clashing — Van Gogh wrote that he wanted to express "the terrible passions of humanity" through color alone.
Vincent van Gogh, "Sunflowers" (1888), oil on canvas, 92.1 × 73 cm. National Gallery, London. One of several versions Van Gogh painted to decorate the Yellow House in Arles. Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Van Gogh's Technique: How He Painted
Van Gogh's painting technique evolved dramatically over his career, but several signature elements define his mature style.
Impasto and Textured Brushwork
Van Gogh applied paint thickly, often straight from the tube, building up ridges and textures that catch real light and create a three-dimensional surface. In paintings like "Starry Night," the swirling sky is built from thick ropes of paint that you can see in profile from the side of the canvas. This impasto technique gives his paintings a physical presence that reproductions cannot capture — you really need to see them in person.
Rhythmic, Directional Strokes
Rather than dabbing paint randomly, Van Gogh used directional brushstrokes that follow the contours of forms. Grass flows in parallel curves, skies swirl in concentric arcs, tree bark follows the grain of the wood. This creates a sense of movement and energy — everything in a Van Gogh painting seems to vibrate with life. The technique owes something to Japanese calligraphy, which Van Gogh admired deeply.
Expressive Color
Van Gogh used color not to describe what things look like, but to express how they feel. He wrote extensively about color theory in his letters to Theo, discussing complementary contrasts, the emotional associations of specific hues, and the way colors interact when placed side by side. "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before my eyes," he wrote, "I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself more forcibly."
This approach — using color for emotional expression rather than optical accuracy — would become the foundation of Expressionism and Fauvism in the early 20th century. Henri Matisse, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the entire German Expressionist movement owed an enormous debt to Van Gogh's color innovations.
The Asylum and Final Works (1889–1890)
After the famous incident in which Van Gogh severed part of his own ear in December 1888 — following a violent argument with Gauguin — his mental health deteriorated. In May 1889, he voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He would spend a year there, and despite severe episodes of illness, he continued to paint prolifically.
The asylum period produced some of his greatest works, including "The Starry Night" (1889), painted from his bedroom window. The painting's swirling sky, with its enormous spiraling stars and crescent moon, is one of the most recognized images in all of art. Beneath the turbulent heavens, a quiet village sleeps peacefully, anchored by a dark cypress tree that flames upward like a green-black torch. The contrast between the cosmic drama above and the human calm below gives the painting its extraordinary emotional power.
Van Gogh left the asylum in May 1890 and moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. He painted furiously for seventy days — producing roughly one painting per day — before shooting himself in the chest on July 27, 1890. He died two days later, with Theo at his side.
Van Gogh's Legacy
Van Gogh's influence on modern art is almost impossible to overstate. His expressive use of color directly inspired the Fauves (Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck), who pushed color even further from naturalism. His emotional intensity and visible brushwork laid the groundwork for Expressionism, from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" to the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. His willingness to distort form for emotional effect anticipated virtually every major movement of the 20th century.
Today, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds the world's largest collection of his work — over 200 paintings, 500 drawings, and more than 700 letters. His paintings regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction. "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" sold for $82.5 million in 1990, setting a record that stood for over a decade.
But Van Gogh's most lasting legacy might be the idea that art should be a direct expression of the artist's inner life. Before Van Gogh, most painters aimed to depict the external world as accurately or beautifully as possible. Van Gogh showed that a painting could be a window into the artist's soul — and that this emotional honesty could resonate with millions of people across cultures and centuries.
Final Thoughts
Vincent van Gogh transformed personal suffering into universal beauty. His thick, swirling brushstrokes, his blazing colors, and his unflinching emotional honesty created a new language for painting — one that spoke directly from heart to heart, bypassing the intellect entirely. He proved that technical perfection matters less than authentic feeling, and that a painting's power comes not from what it depicts but from how deeply the artist means it.
To truly appreciate Van Gogh, visit a museum that holds his work and stand close enough to see the paint ridges catching the light. No reproduction can capture that physical presence. For more on the movement Van Gogh helped inspire, explore our guide to the evolution of art styles, or learn about how art communicates emotion without words.
