Today, Vincent van Gogh is one of the most beloved artists in the world. During his lifetime, however, recognition was scarce, and he depended heavily on the financial support of his younger brother, Theo.
Still, Van Gogh continued to paint.
Painting was not simply a path toward professional success. It became a way of looking closely at the world, giving structure to his days, and carrying on through periods of profound instability.
Van Gogh did not begin his adult life as an artist. He worked for an art dealer, taught school, worked in a bookshop, and hoped for a time to enter the ministry. In the Borinage, a mining region in Belgium, he lived among impoverished miners. None of these paths became a lasting home.
At around twenty-seven, after years of uncertainty and repeated setbacks, he decided to devote himself seriously to art. He had little formal training, no secure income, and no clear future. What he had was persistence. He drew farmers, weavers, worn shoes, and empty chairs—ordinary subjects shaped by work and use. The palette of these early years was dark and heavy, close to the colors of soil and labor.
In 1886, Van Gogh moved to Paris, where Theo was living. Through his brother, he encountered Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and the Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e. Browns and grays gradually gave way to vivid yellows, blues, greens, and reds. Short, repeated brushstrokes began to carry light and movement across his canvases.
The pace of Paris exhausted him. In 1888, seeking clearer light and more intense color, he travelled south to Arles. The orchards were beginning to bloom when he arrived. He painted peach, apricot, and plum trees outdoors, sometimes working in the wind so that he would not miss the brief flowering season.
Nature was never merely a backdrop in these paintings. Van Gogh returned to sowers, flowering trees, ripening fields, and the changing seasons throughout his work. In them, close observation and the rhythms of human life could occupy the same canvas.
Arles was also where his hope of establishing a community of artists collapsed. Paul Gauguin joined him at the Yellow House, but their partnership ended after weeks of deepening tension. In December 1888, Van Gogh experienced a severe mental health crisis.
In May 1889, he voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy. His health alternated between periods in which he could work and attacks that made painting impossible. During roughly a year there, he painted the asylum garden, the wheatfields beyond his window, olive trees, cypresses, and the surrounding landscape, producing about 150 paintings.
Painting did not cure him. But on the days when he could work, it gave form to time and kept him in contact with the world beyond the walls of the asylum.
To describe Van Gogh only through illness and tragedy is to overlook the sustained labor behind the work: the looking, reading, drawing, revising, and beginning again. By the winter of 1890, that long practice had brought him to a large canvas, a flowering branch, and a blue field of sky.
