Today, a painting by Vincent van Gogh sells for more than $80 million. But while he was alive, no one wanted to buy his work. Most people either ignored him or laughed at him.
Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, in the south of the Netherlands. His father was a church minister. He taught Vincent that it was important to help others. Van Gogh tried to be a minister too, but he was not successful. He tried many other jobs, too. He worked as an art seller, a bookseller, and a teacher. He failed at each one. Unfortunately, Van Gogh had mental problems and was often sad or angry. This made it difficult for him to succeed.
Van Gogh was very good at one thing—art. He taught himself to draw and paint. Van Gogh drew all the time. He drew on anything he could find—menus, books, and scraps1 of paper. In 1881, he began to study art, first in Brussels, then in Paris. His early paintings were about poor people in Holland. They were dark pictures and the people in them were sad. When he went to France, Theo admonished2 Vincent that his darkly colored paintings were not in the current Parisian style, where Impressionist3 artists were now using a bright palette4. He started to paint with bright colors. He painted in an exciting way, and his paintings showed his strong feelings. He always painted the ordinary things in life—his bedroom, a chair, or some flowers. Often he went into the country to paint birds, flowers, and fields. In 1885, Vincent completed the Potato Eaters, his first large-scale composition and first masterpiece5.