Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853 in Zundert - July 29, 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise) was a Dutch draughtsman and painter, classified as a Post-Impressionist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular, and most expensive pieces. He suffered from recurrent bouts of mental illness - about which there are many competing theories - and during one episode cut off a part of his ear. Van Gogh spent his early life as an art dealer, teacher and preacher, and he only embarked upon a career as an artist in 1880, at the age of 27. Initially he worked in sombre colours, until an encounter in Paris with Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism accelerated his artistic development. He produced all of his works, some 900 paintings and 1100 drawings, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, and in the two months before his death he painted 90 pictures.
17 Quotes
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
— Vincent Van Gogh
I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.
— Vincent Van Gogh
I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.
— Vincent Van Gogh
It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.
— Vincent Van Gogh
There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
— Vincent Van Gogh
Conscience is a man's compass.
— Vincent Van Gogh
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
— Vincent Van Gogh
A good picture is equivalent to a good deed.
— Vincent Van Gogh
Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence.
— Vincent Van Gogh
The best way to know God is to love many things.
— Vincent Van Gogh
The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic that to love others.
— Vincent Van Gogh
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
— Vincent Van Gogh
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?
— Vincent Van Gogh
The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don't always know if it is green or violet, you can't even say it's blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray.
— Vincent Van Gogh
If you hear a voice within you saying, You are not a painter, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.
— Vincent Van Gogh
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model.
— Vincent Van Gogh
The age of thirty is, for the workingman, just the beginning of a period of some stability, and as such one feels young and full of energy. But, at the same time, a period of life has passed, which makes one melancholy, thinking that some things will never come back.
— Vincent Van Gogh