Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh came to painting late and burned through it fast: a single decade, roughly 900 paintings, and a correspondence with his brother Theo that remains one of the most moving documents in the history of art. He began among the grey peasant interiors of the Dutch provinces, and ended under the mistral light of Provence, where color stopped describing the world and started carrying feeling itself.

The myth of the mad genius obscures a rigorous, deliberate worker who studied color theory, copied Japanese prints, and revised compositions again and again — three Bedrooms, seven Sunflowers. Unsold and largely unknown at his death in 1890, he became within a generation the most beloved painter of the modern age.