Post-Impressionist master, painter of The Starry Night
The most ardent soul of Post-Impressionism. Through his ten years of painting he lived in poverty, tormented by mental illness, selling only a handful of works in his lifetime, yet left behind The Starry Night, the Sunflowers, and Wheatfield with Crows to stun the ages. With swirling strokes and colors so intense they seem to glow, he poured the churning emotion within straight onto the canvas — he never painted only a landscape, but the whole world burning in his eyes.
While living with Gauguin in Arles, the two quarreled fiercely, and Van Gogh, breaking down, cut off one of his own ears. He then entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and it was there, gazing at the night sky through barred windows, that he painted The Starry Night — swirling, roiling stars and moon, the most direct portrait of his turbulent inner world. In the most painful moment of his life, he painted its most immortal night.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.