“My brush goes between my fingers as a bow on a violin”

When I was seventeen I was accepted into Art college to become a potter. To tell the truth I had little interest in artists but I found in Van Gogh’s work something different. Maybe it was the style of painting or maybe it was his subject matter, peasants and landscapes that attracted me.

He seemed to paint the real people, but one thing was for sure, in a time of black and white photography these were contemporary colour reproductions of real life. In fact, they were among the first pictures that spawned the new age of contemporary art.

While in America in 2000 I visited the famous Guggenheim gallery in New York and actually saw some of his paintings up close. Although small pictures, I marvelled at the work on display and I could see why John Denver wrote that famous song dedicated to this man.

Vincent Van Gogh had little success during his lifetime. It took until 1901, 11 years after his death, before he became famous when 71 of his 900 paintings were shown in Paris. He lived penniless and died the same, but his paintings sold for some of the highest prices ever in the history of art. His ‘Irises’ sold for an incredible $53.9 million in 1990.

Born on 30th March 1853 at Groot Zundert, Holland, near the Belgian border, his father was a Pastor of the reformed church. The family consisted of three boys and three girls. Vincent was the eldest.

He was a bad-tempered boy who rarely smiled. His early interest was nature in all its forms. When he grew up he worked as a clerk at the Goupil Art Gallery in the Hague. He was sent in 1873 to the London branch of the Gallery.

He stayed at Lambeth, and was very happy until he fell in love with the Landlady’s daughter and was rejected. He was then transferred to Paris. Due to his bad temper he lost his job and then decided to teach at Ramsgate in Kent before becoming an assistant to a Methodist minister, the Reverend Jones of Isleworth. Here he began to preach sermons.

Vincent then returned to Holland and began a course to become a lay preacher. He failed this but still got a position at Boringe near Mons.

The self-denial and mortification that he practised during his studies served him well here, as he gave away everything he owned and lived in rags, slept on straw and ate barely anything. This lasted for two years. It was here that he began to draw and paint. At 27, it was time for this tired young man to return home to his family and to realise that art was his real vocation.

He stayed with his family until argument after argument led to him being expelled for the rest of his life from the home he was raised in. His art continued in Nuenen then, due to one of his peasant models claiming he had got her pregnant, he left and moved to Antwerp. Here he developed syphilis and lost several of his teeth. He then painted in Paris, where he worked furiously. Van Gogh drank excessive amounts of absinthe and suffered from mental deterioration.

He moved to Arles, where he painted more than 200 canvases in 15 months and invited the artist Gaugain to stay with him. They argued furiously until Van Gogh pulled a razor blade and held it to him. He then withdrew to a hotel and cut off the lower part of his left ear and delivered it to a prostitute saying, “Keep this object carefully.” Thirty citizens then signed a petition to send Vincent to an asylum.

He moved in with his brother Theo with the hundreds of paintings which had accumulated over the years. He made several attempts at suicide and eventually went into a wood and shot himself. When he was discovered the bullet could not be removed as it was too close to his heart and he died in his brother’s arms.