Works by Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh painted for little more than ten years, moving from peasant scenes in dark brown to brighter colour in Paris and then, in the south of France, to the yellows, blues and thick, swirling paint of his last years.

The lithograph of The Potato Eaters is printed in dark brown ink: five people round a table under one hanging lamp, the nearest seen only from behind. The painting, made in Nuenen in 1885, was his first major work, and Theo, his brother and a dealer in Paris, found it too dark for a modern style. In Antwerp that winter he studied Rubens, added carmine, cobalt blue and emerald green to his paints and bought Japanese woodcuts in the docks. In Paris he collected them by the hundred, and in 1887, at Asnières, he borrowed the small separate dots of Pointillism. The 1887 Self-Portrait is built from such touches: flecks of orange and blue over dark green behind the head, a coat of short red, green and blue strokes.

Arles, where he arrived in February 1888, filled his canvases with yellow, ultramarine and mauve. In May 1889 he entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and its garden became one of his main subjects. He began Irises there in his first week: blue flowers with one white bloom among them, orange flowers behind, red earth in a corner and leaves running off the edges. In the Getty's view the composition was probably influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. In Arles his cypresses stood far off as windbreaks; in Saint-Rémy they move up close. In Wheat Field with Cypresses the tallest, almost black-green, rises on the right against white clouds laid on in thick curls. Short of subjects in the clinic, he also painted his own versions of pictures by Jean-François Millet and others, and likened this to a musician playing Beethoven.

In May 1890 he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, closer to Theo and to Dr Paul Gachet, and painted about seventy oils in about as many days. His only etching, Dr. Gachet (Man with a Pipe), shows the doctor with his hand at his mouth and a pipe in his fingers, a fence and looping bushes scratched in behind him. The wheat fields held him from May, when the crop was still young and green, to July, when he wrote of a pale yellow plain stretching to the hills.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago.