Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was born in Zundert in the Dutch province of North Brabant, the son of a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. He worked as an art dealer, including a spell in London, and then as a missionary among the miners of the Borinage in Belgium, before taking up painting in 1881. His training was brief: study at the academy in Brussels, and lessons in The Hague from his second cousin Anton Mauve, who introduced him to watercolour. His early pictures of peasants and still lifes show little of the colour that came later. That arrived in Paris from 1886, where he met Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin and took up elements of Pointillism, and it was fully realised in Arles in 1888, where he painted the Sunflowers to decorate the Yellow House ahead of Gauguin's visit. He was unsuccessful in his lifetime; his reputation grew in the early twentieth century, as the Fauves and German Expressionists absorbed elements of his style. Eight works here, among them Almond Blossom, painted for his newborn nephew, as well as Irises, Pietà (after Delacroix) and The Starry Night.