Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by symbolic colourisation and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive paintwork. He sold only one painting during his lifetime and...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth30 March 1853
CityZundert, Netherlands
If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.
There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.
My sketchbook is a witness of what I am experiencing, scribbling things whenever they happen.
There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even—the French air clears up the brain and does good—a world of good.
Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.
But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim-and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly-a reason the more to lose no time.
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
To do good work one must eat well, be well housed, have one's fling from time to time, smoke one's pipe, and drink one's coffee in peace
Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.
Occasionally, in times of worry, I've longed to be stylish, but on second thought I say no-just let me be myself-and express rough, yet true things with rough workmanship.
Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.