Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh spent his twenties failing: at the family art dealing business, at teaching, at preaching to Belgian coal miners whose poverty he tried to share by giving away his possessions. At 27, having failed at everything else, he decided to become an artist. He had almost no training, but he had will: he copied Millet obsessively, drew miners and peasants until his hands ached, studied color theory until he understood how complementary colors could make each other vibrate. His early work was dark, earthy, somber, The Potato Eaters shows peasants whose faces have been shaped by labor. Then came Paris, where he discovered Impressionism and Japanese prints; his palette exploded into color. In Arles, in the south of France, he found the yellow he had been seeking: the sun-drenched light that blazed through his sunflowers, his bedroom, his café at night.