Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh came to painting late and worked at it for barely a decade. Before that he sold prints for a Paris art dealer, taught briefly in England, and spent a miserable stretch as a lay preacher among Belgian coal miners, sleeping on straw and giving away his clothes. He was twenty-seven when he decided to draw for a living.

The early Dutch work is dark and heavy, all peat browns and lamp-black. The Potato Eaters, finished in Nuenen in 1885, is the high point of that phase and looks almost nothing like what came after. Two years in Paris with his brother Theo changed the palette completely. He saw Impressionist canvases and Japanese prints, and the mud lifted.

Arles is where the paintings most people picture were made: the sunflowers, the yellow house, the wheatfields under a sky that will not sit still. Then Saint-Rémy, then Auvers, then nothing. He was thirty-seven.

Roughly 860 oil paintings survive. The ones most people know were made in his last two and a half years. He sold almost none of them.