“The more I become dissipated, sick, broken vase, the more I become an artist, a creator… with how much less effort one could have lived life, instead of making art”. As brilliant as he was misunderstood in life, the painter Vincent van Gogh profoundly influenced the art of the twentieth century. We offer you a small selection of his works, made in chronological order over the span of his short life By him. The works of Vincent van GoghThe Potato Eaters
This is the most important painting of Van Gogh’s Dutch period, before his move to Paris. Vincent worked on this canvas from April 13 until the beginning of May 1885, by which time the painter had almost finished the work. Only a few changes made later but still in the same year with a small brush were missing. Van Gogh’s personality begins to emerge with the ‘underground works’ of the Dutch period. In fact, it is here that when he begins to engage in dozens of studies on some particular themes, such as potato eaters, his first masterpiece. Sunflowers
These are a series of paintings made between 1888 and 1889. Among the painter’s favorite subjects, they are today among his most recognizable and well-known works by the general public.Starry night over the Rhone
Painted in 1888 during his stay in Arles, this masterful work is all played through vibrant brushstrokes and reflections between water and sky: a nocturnal poem in the moonlight. Café terrace in the evening, Place du Forum, Arles
It is a painting made in 1888, kept in the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo. Van Gogh dedicate several paintings to this subject. In a letter, the artist himself described the circumstances in which he had made the work: “Up to now you have not told me whether you have read Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant or not and what you think of his talent. I tell you this because the opening of Bel Ami contains a description of a starlit night in Paris with the brightly lit cafes on the boulevard and it’s roughly the same subject I just painted ”. Vincent’s room in Arles
Made in October 1888, the painting shows the painter’s bedroom, painted in anticipation of the arrival in Arles by Paul Gauguin, a friend of the artist: the meeting should have given rise to the birth of an artistic circle. The shades of green and light blue aim to give a sense of tranquility and comfortable serenity, reinforced by the pictorial representation that lingers on the large bed and on the few objects in the tidy and clean room. Van Gogh would have liked to express a sense of tranquility in the work, but the result is a sense of anguish due to the black line that surrounds the objects, the clear and shadowless colors and the sloping walls and floor, almost on the verge of collapse, giving the feeling that everything is slowly sliding to the left. Self-portrait with bandaged ear
At the end of 1888, the coexistence of Van Gogh and Gauguin ended in tragedy: on 23 December, in fact, Vincent cut off his right ear with a razor and took it to a prostitute he had grown fond of. Having recovered, after two weeks in the hospital, he withdrew several times with his ear bandaged. The artist’s face is haggard, his gaze lost in space: the hat and coat, also worn at home, seem to suggest the absence of heating, which perhaps, due to the always precarious economic conditions, the artist could not afford; but they can also have the deeper meaning of shelter from a world that Vincent now considers an enemy. This portrait confirms that the experience with Gauguin had been truly extreme for Van Gogh, who will spend his last year and a half of life in partly voluntary, partly forced solitude.Starry Night
Since his arrival in Arles, in 1888, the representation of the ‘night effects’ has become a constant concern for Van Gogh. During the period of hospitalization in the asylum, the artist creates “Starry Night”, a work that can be grasped with immediacy, apparently simple , but of a very complex nature. In the period of realization of this canvas, Van Gogh’s paintings are loaded with symbolic meanings: the cypress almost represents the aspiration to infinity, the strength of the sought-after peace, mirror of the painter’s soul; the landscape, at first sight idyllic and reconciling, instead manifests the tormented personality of Van Gogh. The hills, treated with wavy and parallel lines, seem threatening seething waters. While the swirling sky, with more or less bright stars, seems to be traversed by dangerous fireballs dragged by the current of space. This effect is given by the artist thanks to the particular pictorial technique: the color, with a very fluid consistency, is spread with a minimum thickness, with small close touches, leaving at times small empty spaces, from which the texture of the underlying canvas can also be glimpsed. which, in correspondence with the stars, simulates their flickering.Blossoming almond branch
Painted in Saint Remy in 1890, the canvas was a gift that the same painter gave to his brother Theo Van Gogh and his wife Johanna Bonger for the birth of their little son, named Vincent Willem. As a symbol of life, Van Gogh chose the branches of the almond tree, one of the first flowering trees which, in the sunny south, announced the imminent spring in that February. The work was certainly inspired by Japanese prints, probably the first of a series that Vincent was unable to finish because he was upset by a crisis. The church of Auvers
After Van Gogh left Saint-Remy hospital on May 16, 1890, I left the south of France to head north. He visited his brother Theo van Gogh in Paris and then went to Auvers-sur-Oise, on the advice of his friend Camille Pissarro, to be placed under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet. Here Van Gogh spent the last ten weeks of his life and in this short space of time he painted over 100 pictures, including The Church of Auvers. Wheat field with crow flights
Made in July 1890, this painting is believed to be, but probably mistakenly, the last painting painted by Van Gogh before he died. Generally critics and art historians see in this painting a representation of the artist’s tormented and distressed state of mind. The canvas is an excruciating cry of pain, accentuated by the whirling rhythm of the brush strokes, through which he projects his own state of mind and his dimension of suffering onto the surrounding reality. It is known that the artist had a deep respect for the forces of nature. This explains why he painted troubled skies in many of his works of him. In fact, he believed that the subject had an incalculable artistic potential if reproduced on a canvas.
