🌱 1853 · Born in Zundert, a pastor's son in the quiet Dutch countryside. Nothing in his first 27 years suggested painting — that is the strangest part of the story.
Van Gogh: ten years, ten paintings
🖼️ 1869-76 · Art dealer at Goupil & Cie in The Hague, then London and Paris. He sold pictures for seven years before it occurred to him to make one.
⛪ 1878-79 · Missionary among the coal miners of the Borinage, Belgium. He gave away his clothes and slept on straw; the church committee dismissed him for 'excessive zeal.'
✏️ 1880 · At 27, in his darkest year, the decision: he would become an artist. Brother Theo began sending money — a lifeline that would last the rest of his life.
📐 1881-83 · Etten, then The Hague: drawing peasants, learning perspective from books, filling sketchbook after sketchbook. Ten years of art compressed the hard way.
🥔 1885 · Nuenen — PAINTING I: The Potato Eaters. Dark, earthy, deliberately ugly by academic standards. 'I wanted it to speak of manual labour,' he wrote. His first masterpiece; almost nobody agreed.
🏙️ 1886 · Moves in with Theo in Paris. Meets the Impressionists — and his palette detonates: out with the browns, in with color as feeling.
🎨 1887 · PAINTING II: Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat. Short strokes of orange against blue vibrate around his face — he practiced the new color theory on the cheapest model available: himself.
🌻 Feb 1888 · South to Arles, chasing the light of Provence. In fifteen months there he will produce roughly 200 paintings — a pace with no parallel in art history.
🏠 1888 · PAINTING III: The Yellow House. He rents four rooms and dreams of a 'Studio of the South,' a brotherhood of painters. He buys twelve chairs, full of hope.
🌻 Aug 1888 · PAINTING IV: Sunflowers. Painted to decorate Gauguin's room, yellow on yellow on yellow. 'The sunflower is mine,' he wrote — and 130 years agree.
☕ Sep 1888 · PAINTING V: Café Terrace at Night. His first starry sky — a night painted without using black at all. Cobalt, citron, gaslight orange.
🛏️ Oct 1888 · PAINTING VI: The Bedroom. Flat color, tilted floor, absolute calm — 'the painting should rest the head, or rather the imagination.' He repainted it twice from memory.
🍷 Oct 1888 · Gauguin arrives at last. Nine weeks of painting side by side, arguing about art by night. Two geniuses, one small yellow house — it could not hold.
🩸 Dec 23, 1888 · The breakdown: the razor, the severed ear, the hospital. Gauguin leaves for Paris. The Studio of the South dies at nine weeks old.
🏥 May 1889 · He commits himself voluntarily to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy. They give him two cells: one to sleep in, one to paint in.
🌌 Jun 1889 · PAINTING VII: The Starry Night. Painted from memory and the view through a barred window — the sky in spirals, the cypress like a black flame. He thought it a failure.
🌸 1889 · PAINTING VIII: Irises. Painted in the asylum garden his first week there, before the storms returned. Japanese in its lines, defiantly alive.
🖌️ 1889-90 · Between crises he paints without pause: wheatfields, cypresses, olive groves, copies after Millet. Painting is not a career now; it is the handrail.
📰 Jan 1890 · The first serious recognition: critic Albert Aurier publishes a glowing essay on his work. Anna Boch buys The Red Vineyard — the one confirmed sale of his lifetime.
🌸 Feb 1890 · PAINTING IX: Almond Blossom. Branches against a sky of impossible blue, painted for the newborn nephew Theo named Vincent. The gentlest picture he ever made.
🏡 May 1890 · Released, he moves to Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, under the eye of Dr. Gachet. Seventy paintings in seventy days — one final, furious bloom.
🌾 Jul 1890 · PAINTING X: Wheatfield with Crows. Threatening sky, three diverging paths, black wings over gold. Not his last painting, but forever read as a farewell.
🕯️ Jul 29, 1890 · Shot in the chest in the wheatfields on the 27th, he dies two days later with Theo at his bedside. He was 37. His last words, per Theo: 'La tristesse durera toujours.'
💔 Jan 1891 · Theo, broken, dies six months after his brother. He is buried beside Vincent at Auvers — the two graves share a single ivy.
📚 1891-1914 · Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, inherits 400 paintings nobody wants — and spends two decades organizing exhibitions and publishing the letters. She built the legend, deliberately.
🌍 1905 · The great Amsterdam retrospective: 484 works. The painters see it — Fauvism and Expressionism carry his brushwork into the new century.
🏛️ 1962-73 · The collection passes to the Dutch state; the Van Gogh Museum opens in Amsterdam. The unsold canvases now draw two million visitors a year.
💰 1990 · Portrait of Dr. Gachet sells for $82.5 million — then the highest price ever paid for a painting. One hundred years, from one sale to priceless.
✉️ The letters · 903 survive, most to Theo. 'What is done in love is done well' — the paintings show what he saw; the letters show who he was.
🎨 The count · Ten years as an artist. Roughly 900 paintings, 1,100 drawings, one sale. History has no better argument against measuring worth by the market.
⭐ Coda · He painted the night sky from an asylum window and made despair look like ecstasy. Ten years was enough.