Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh was the son of a Dutch pastor and worked as an art dealer, teacher and lay preacher, including a spell in England, before turning to art in his late twenties. His early pictures of peasant life, such as The Potato Eaters, are dark, but in Paris and then in Arles in the south of France his colour became intense and his brushwork bold. In about ten years he made some 2,100 works, among them Sunflowers, now in the National Gallery, and The Starry Night, painted at the asylum in Saint-Rémy. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime and died of a gunshot wound at Auvers-sur-Oise at thirty-seven.