Dutch painter (1853–1890)
Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.
Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Portrait adapted from: Wikimedia Commons, Vincent van Gogh (CC BY-SA)
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..At the end of the month I should like to go to the hospital at St. Remy or another institution of this kind. What comforts me a little, is that I am beginning to consider madness as a disease like any other and accept the thing as such, whereas during the crises themselves, I thought that everything I imagined was real.. .After all.. .I have perhaps still some almost normal years in front of me.
As I feel a need to speak out frankly, I cannot hide from you that I am overcome by a feeling of great care, depression, a "je ne sais quoi" of discouragement and despair more than I can tell.
I take it so much to heart that I do not get on better with people in general; it quite worries me because on it depends so much my success in carrying out my work.
In the midst of life we are near death, that is a phrase which touches each one of us personally, it is a truth we see again confirmed in what you tell me about Carolien van Stockum, and formerly we saw it in another member of the same family. It has touched me, and with all my heart I hope she may recover. Oh! what sorrow, what sadness and suffering there is in the world, in public as well as in private life.
..the best way to know God is to love many things. Love a friend, a wife, something, whatever you like.. .But one must love with a lofty and serious intimate sympathy, with strength, with intelligence... That leads to God, that leads to unwavering faith.. .To give you an example: someone loves Rembrandt, but seriously, - that man will know that there is a God, he will surely believe it.. .To try to understand the real significance, of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God..
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There are things which we feel to be good and true, though in the cold light of reason and calculation many things remain incomprehensible and dark. And though the society in which we live considers such actions thoughtless, or reckless, or I don't know what else, what can we say if once the hidden forces of sympathy and love have been roused in us? And though it may be that we cannot argue against the reasoning sentiment and to act from impulse, one would almost conclude that some people have cauterized certain sensitive nerves within them, especially those which, combined, are called conscience. Well, I pity those people; they travel through life without compass, in my opinion.
There was a sale here [in Paris] of drawings by Millet, I don't know whether I've already written to you about it. When I entered the room in Hôtel Drouot where they were exhibited, I felt something akin to: 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground' [Bible-text]. You know that Millet lived [in his youth] in Gréville. Well, I don't know whether it was Gréville or Granville where the man I once told you about died. At any rate, I looked at Millet's drawings of 'The cliffs at Gréville', with redoubled attention.
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