Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh, most commonly known as Vincent Van Gogh was born in the southern Netherlands, in a town called Zundert, in March of 1853. The Dutch painter became one of the most famous figures in art history - if not the most famous - creating over two thousand artworks during about a decade of production. Van Gogh concluded an enormous amount of paintings during the last two years of his life as he was afflicted, becoming known as the "tortured artist." He grew up in a religious household, his father was a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, a path Van Gogh was passionate about and began to study after he worked as an art dealer with his uncle. In was only at twenty-seven years of age that Van Gogh began following an artistic career of his own, enrolling in the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in 1880, located in Brussels, Belgium. In 1885, the Dutch artist concluded his first masterpiece entitled The Potato Eaters, an oil painting portraying a family of peasants sitting at the table in a dark room. This artwork, along with many other of Van Gogh's works, was influenced by the past Dutch masters of the Baroque movement like Peter Paul Rubens, with its dramatic shadows, as well as the Realists, who often painted workers of the rural areas.