Artist Biography

Wheat Field with Cypresses

Self-Portrait, August 1889

Tournesols

Self-Portrait, September 1886

VINCENTvanGOGH

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Post-Impressionist painter. He was a Dutch artist whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. His output includes portraits, self portraits, landscapes and still lifes of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers. He drew as a child but did not paint until his late twenties; he completed many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, including 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. After years of anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Van Gogh painted several still lifes of shoes or boots during his Paris period. This picture, painted later, in Arles, evinces a unique return to the earlier motif. However, here Van Gogh has placed the shoes within a specific spatial context: namely, the red-tile floor of the Yellow House.

Roses, 1890

About the Artist