[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Biography Of Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Willem Van Gogh, Dutch postimpressionist artiste, whose vocation represents the epitome of expressionism, the initiative of emotional spontaneity in painting. Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, a small town in Brabant, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor.
Early in life he displayed a “moody, restless temperament” (Tralbaut, 1969) that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been in turn a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners at Wasmes in Belgium.
Vincent worked on The Potato Eaters throughout April of 1885. He had produced various drafts in preparation of the final, large oil on canvas version. The Potato Eaters is acknowledged to be Vincent van Gogh's first true “masterpiece and he was encouraged by the outcome” (Pickvance, 2000). His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters. Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence Van Gogh's intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.
In 1886 Van Gogh went to Paris to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the work of the impressionists and by the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai, Van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques. Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.
In 1888 Vincent left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region....
