Vincent van Gogh was the son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, and he originally planned to study theology. He worked in branches of the Paris art dealer Goupil in The Hague, Brussels and London during the years of 1869-1876. He had been an assistant teacher and preacher in and near London in 1876 and was trained as a lay preacher in 1877/78, when he began to draw. He became a lay preacher in the mining area of Borinage in 1878, suffering from poverty. His early works reflect van Gogh's desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium. His brother Theo, the art dealer, began to support him financially. In 1880, he decided turning to a career as an artist and studied at the academy in Brussels. He stayed together with the Realist painter A. Mauve in The Hague and lived with a prostitute in 1881, until 1883; he lived at his parent's house in Nuenen, he drew and painted dark realistic scenes from the life of the poor. He had stayed in Antwerp in 1885/86 for a short time at the college of art. After 1886, he came to Paris and lived with his brother Theo in the Rue Lepic. At the Atelier Cormon he met Bernard and Toulouse-Lautrec, and through Theo the Impressionists, Neo-Impressionists, and the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai. He began to employ their motifs, brilliant hues and style of painting, such as also found in the paintings of Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.

He left Paris for Arles in 1888, where he continued painting in a heavy style with strong colors. A short period of artistic cooperation with Gauguin ended in a disastrous row and mental instability; in a bout of maddened remorse he cut off part of his left ear. He stayed in hospital in 1889 at Arles was also institutionalized in Saint-Remy. In 1890 he exhibited with Les Vingt in Brussels, where one of his acquaintances, the painter Anna Boch, bought the only painting he ever sold in his lifetime. He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890. There he was treated by the sympathetic Dr. Paul Gachet, a physician friend of Pissarro and Cézanne who was interested in the arts and psychiatry, whose portrait van Gogh eventually painted. Later the same year, after painting the ominous "Crows in the Wheatfields", he shot himself (at the age of thirty-seven). His extensive work (around 750 paintings and 1600 drawings) also became a basic influence on the development of Fauvism and Expressionism. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing over 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.