Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Still life wtih Basket of Apples (nn04) | Old Farmhouses | The Potato Eaters (nn04) | Still Life with Bloaters and Garlic (nn04) | Mademoiselle Gachet am Klavier |
Related Artists:
Walter Crane,RWS
1845-1915 English painter, illustrator, designer, writer and teacher. He showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane (1808-59). A series of illustrations to Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) was shown first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour, and then to the engraver William James Linton, to whom Crane was apprenticed in 1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks. His early illustrative works included vignette wood-engravings for John R. Capel Wise's The New Forest: Its History and its Scenery (1862).
Orozco, Jose Clemente
Mexican, 1883-1949 Mexican mural painter. When he lost his left hand at age 17, he abandoned architectural studies for painting, pursuing Mexican themes. As a caricaturist for a revolutionary paper, he explored Mexico City's slums and painted a series of watercolours, House of Tears, on the lives of prostitutes. The reaction of moralists forced him to flee to the U.S. in 1917, but in 1919 the new government of Álvaro Obreg??n welcomed him back, and he joined Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros in creating large-scale murals for public buildings, in which he continued his radical social commentary. Again forced to abandon Mexico in 1927, he worked until 1934 in the U.S., where his style evolved and matured in murals from coast to coast. In 1934, his international reputation firmly established, he returned to Mexico and embarked on his most technically impressive and emotionally expressive murals, including Catharsis (1934),
Thomas Rowlandson
English Illustrator, 1756-1827,English caricaturist, watercolourist, draughtsman and engraver. Although he is commonly thought of as a satirist, most of his drawings are gently humorous, and in some cases objective, records of urban and rustic life. With the exception of a small number of topographical drawings, they are characterized by an abundance of picaresque incidents, whether robust or sentimental, and have much in common with the novels of Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding, which Rowlandson illustrated in 1808 and 1809.