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Vincent van Gogh
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Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 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 bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.
“I am sure you will like it, it is such a fine business [art-dealer].. ..I am so glad that we shall both be in the same profession [art dealing] and in the same firm [Goupil and Co.]”
“..by going on drawing those types of working people, etc., I hope to arrive at the point of being able to do illustration work for papers and books.”
“Do you know what I long for sometimes? To make a trip to Brabant. I should love to draw the old churchyard at Nuenen, and the weavers. To make, for instance, during a month, studies of Brabant, and to come back [to The Hague] with a lot of them, for a large drawing of a peasant funeral for instance.”
“I am not working for myself alone, I believe in the absolute necessity for a new art of color, of design, and - of the artistic life..”
“This art that we are all working in, we feel it has a long future before it, and one must have some settled base, like steady people, and not like decadents. Here my life will become more and more like a Japanese painter's, living close to nature like a petty tradesman.”
“The thing has already taken form in my mind before I start it. The first attempts are absolutely unbearable. I say this because I want you to know that if you see something worthwhile in what I am doing, it is not by accident but because of real direction and purpose.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
Not who you're looking for? Others named Vincent van Gogh: painting by John Peter Russell, 1886