| So, continuing in our series of important artists, |
| ones who have really shaped and influenced art today, |
| we're going to look at Van Gough - Vincent Willem van Gogh, |
| who was born in 1853 |
| and who died in 1890, at only the age of 37. |
| Van Gogh began to draw as a child, |
| and although he drew throughout his youth, |
| he did not use the medium of paint until his late twenties. |
| Actually he originally intended to become a pastor, |
| and even worked as a missionary in a mining regions of Belgium. |
| It was here where he began to sketch members of the local community, |
| and you can see on the slide here, |
| one of his first major works, the Potato Eaters. |
| You can see that his palette is very somber... lots of earth tones. |
| There's none of that vivid coloration that you see in his later work. |
| Really, not what you'd expect from Van Gogh at all. |
| Something occurred to make Vincent change his mind regarding where he saw his true path in life, |
| and he headed to Paris in 1886 to work for an art dealership. |
| And it makes you wonder what, if anything really, Van Gogh would have contributed to the art world |
| had he not given up on the devout, spiritual path, |
| because it wasn't until he came to Paris that he developed his distinctive style. |
| That said, it seems that he was greatly influenced by the strong sunlight there, |
| because, as I mentioned before, his work got distinctly more vibrant and flamboyant in that respect. |
| Two years later, he stayed in Arles, |
| and it was after that when he developed his highly recognizable style |
| and created his famous works, like 'Sunflowers' and his self-portrait. |
| Remember, this is only two years before his death, |
| so it wasn't until really later on in life that he really came into his own. |
| Now Van Gogh did suffer considerably from mental health issues, |
| and art critics love to speculate how his mental health affected his work, |
| and there's been a tendency over the years to... well.. romanticize this, |
| by which I mean that it has been proposed that his illness was a considerable creative force, |
| which is not very sympathetic, given the struggles Van Gogh must have gone through to cope with it. |
| And other critics see him as this frustrated character, |
| whose illness brought on bouts of inactivity that prevented him from... well.. concentrating on his art, |
| but this doesn't quite hang together in my mind, |
| given his copious productivity during his later years. |
| That said, there is a general agreement among art historians, however, |
| that Van Gogh went beyond the superficial, discovering essential truths, |
| and this seems to echo what was going on in the psychological world at the time, |
| because while Van Gogh was painting what lay beneath the surface, |
| Freud was mining the depths of the subconscious. |
| Shortly before his death, Van Gogh wrote a letter to an acquaintance |
| saying that, being childless, he viewed his paintings as his progeny. |
| And indeed, you might say that Van Gogh had a great many heirs, |
| as a great many artists have adapted elements of Van Gogh's style into their own artwork - |
| like Willem de Kooning, Howard Hodgkin and Jackson Pollock to name but a few. |
| So even though he was a little-known artist when he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, |
| which sadly may well have been self-inflicted, |
| Vincent Van Gogh is truly a painter who has stood the test of time. |