Wheat Field with Cypresses

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose turbulent, passionate life and incandescent artistic vision produced one of the most beloved and emotionally powerful bodies of work in the history of Western art. Born in Zundert in the Netherlands to a Protestant minister and his wife, he was a deeply sensitive, intense child who would carry that sensitivity — both as gift and burden — throughout his entire life. Van Gogh came to painting late, only beginning his artistic career in earnest in his late twenties after failed attempts at careers as an art dealer, teacher, and evangelical missionary. He was largely self-taught in his early years, his early works dark and earthen in palette, most notably The Potato Eaters (1885), a raw and compassionate portrayal of peasant life in the Netherlands. Everything changed when he moved to Paris in 1886, where exposure to the Impressionists and Japanese woodblock prints electrified his palette and loosened his brush. He moved to Arles in southern France in 1888, entering the most extraordinarily productive period of his life — painting sunflowers, orchards, starry nights, and portraits with a feverish, joyful intensity that produced masterpiece after masterpiece. His friendship with Gauguin ended catastrophically, and it was during this period that he famously severed part of his own ear during a mental breakdown. He voluntarily committed himself to the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889, continuing to paint prolifically — including Wheat Field with Cypresses and the iconic The Starry Night — before moving to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died of a gunshot wound at just 37, in circumstances that remain debated to this day. He sold only one painting in his lifetime, yet left behind over 2,100 works that changed the course of art forever.