Unveiling the secret of a lifetime of tragedy

Usually, visiting museums is a wonderful way to learn about the history and culture of a country. And perhaps the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is one of the most famous and beloved museums in the Netherlands, with over 1.5 million visitors each year before the Covid pandemic. Because of Van Gogh…

Vincent van Gogh, one of the most famous painters of the 19th century, was born in 1853 and passed away in 1890. He was a Dutch painter widely recognized as a self-taught artist.

According to the Van Gogh Museum’s documents, he taught himself how to paint with the help of textbooks, as well as attending classes at several art schools in Belgium, museum tours, and advice from friends who were painters. He also wrote plays, short stories, and drafted essays and letters—quite a lot; some have been translated into English.

The Van Gogh Museum also houses a collection of paintings by contemporary artists, the teachers… of Van Gogh in the 19th century. This museum also has a quite large collection of letters—over 200 out of more than 300 letters—that Vincent wrote to Theo, his brother, who held a significant place in the life of the famous painter.
The vast body of work reflects quite detailed aspects of the life of the talented painter Van Gogh. His subjects include self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits, paintings of trees, rice fields, and sunflowers…
Entering the museum, it seems that the people working here have displayed a book that describes in quite detail the life of Van Gogh, from when he started learning to paint and experimenting with his first works to his final paintings.

When viewing Van Gogh’s paintings at the museum named after him, one can clearly feel a sense of emptiness and loss. Whether the paintings depict portraits, flowers, fields, or grand landscapes, the more we look, the more we feel an overwhelming sense of sadness rising within them.

In those paintings, he seems to be looking at himself, his own life.

Van Gogh is indeed one of the greatest painters of all time, a pioneer of expressionism, and a significant influence on modern art. He is also an artist who possesses many of the most famous, beloved, and quite valuable works.

For example, in November 2021, four of his paintings, including “Wooden Cabins among the Olive Trees and Cypresses,” were sold by Christie’s auction house in New York for 161 million USD. Also in November, but in 2017, still auctioned by Christie’s in New York, the painting “Labourer in a Field” fetched 81.3 million USD!
Even though he only truly painted in the last ten years of his life, he left humanity with more than 2,100 works, including 860 oil paintings and over 1,300 drawings, sketches, and watercolor prints. But the museum named after him in Amsterdam cannot collect them all, as mentioned.

It seems that in many moments of life, Van Gogh felt sad. The viewer can easily recognize the sadness on his face in the painting “The Potato Eaters,” for example. This painting is also known as the “lonely painting,” with Van Gogh holding a potato in one hand and a knife in the other.

For Van Gogh, sunflowers were also one of the many sources of inspiration he used to create his masterpieces of flower still lifes, known as “The Sunflowers.” (When he passed away, those who came to pay their respects all held a sunflower branch in their hands.)