Vincent Van Gogh trivia | 60 facts about the famous painter

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most successful and famous painters worldwide. His art is very valuable, and he is considered an influential persona in art.

Let’s find out more about him!

1. His full name is Vincent Willem van Gogh.
2. He was born in 30 March 1853 in the Netherlands.
3. He was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.
4. Van Gogh’s mother came from a prosperous family in The Hague, and his father was the youngest son of a ministe.
5. In just over a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life.
6. Van Gogh’s parents married in May 1851 and moved to Zundert.
7. Together they had 6 children along with Vincent.
8. Vincent remained close friend with Theo and Willemina.
9. He was taught at home by his mother and a governess.
10. In 1860 was sent to the village school. In 1864, he was placed in a boarding school at Zevenbergen, where he felt abandoned, and campained to come back. Instead he was sent in anither school away from home.
11. There were four Vincent van Goghs.
12. Vincent van Gogh the artist was named after his older stillborn brother Vincent, who was in turn named after their grandfather.
13. Another of van Gogh’s brothers, Theo, fathered a son – whom he named Vincent Willem van Gogh.
14. Vincent suffered from many mental illnesses.
15. Many modern-day psychiatrists have attempted to diagnose van Gogh’s illness from the symptoms he appeared to have exhibited over his life.
16. Some of their diagnoses include hallucinations, depression, and seizures.
17. The probable diagnoses include schizophrenia, syphilis, manic depression, hypergraphia, Geschwind’s syndrome, and temporal lobe epilepsy.
18. If family anecdotes are to be relied upon, one could also make a case that he fell somewhere along the autism spectrum.
19. Describing Van Gogh as a child, his sister Elizabeth said he was “intensely serious and uncommunicative, and walked around clumsily and in a daze, with his head hung low.
20. Biographer Charles Moffatt noted that he had an “inability to read the intent and emotions of others.
21. He started drawing and painting at the age of 27.
22. While he was alive he only sold 1 painting. Wow!
23. He was thrown out of his family home following a string of failed career attempts (art dealer, teacher, bookstore clerk, pastor).
24. It was then that Vincent van Gogh began drawing.
25. A year later, he acquired painting supplies thanks to his brother Theo, who was willing to monetarily support Vincent during this time.
26. Van Gogh had a cruch to his widowed cousin.
27. He also had another crush on a disinterested upper class woman named Eugenia.
28. Once he left his family home in Holland and moved to The Hague, however, he mainly commiserated with prostitutes.
29. Van Gogh had a favorite prostitute named Sien, whom he lived with and took care of.
30. Actually, he even helped raise her baby for a time.
31. Van Gogh sketched many portraits of Sien
32. His family didn’t approve their intimacy and relationship, so tt his brother Theo’s urging, van Gogh left her and moved to Drenthe, another province in the Netherlands.
33. Although he had some other unsuccessful relationships, he died alone.
34. He died in  29 July 1890.
35. The colors we see are not, in fact, what the artist meant for us to see.
36. More specifically the yellow tones are not the ones he wanted to be on his paintings.
37. Like many artists of the time, van Gogh used an unstable pigment called chrome yellow that was prone to fading or browning over time. The chemical change is irreversible, so we can only imagine the luminosity the paintings once held.
38. As for van Gogh’s common usage of the color yellow, biographer Charles Moffatt believes it reflects points of time when van Gogh was on a bi-polar upswing.
39. In a period of three years, Vincent van Gogh produced over 43 self-portraits
40. . While tempting to consider this an exercise in vanity, it’s more likely that this was a result of poverty, in both an emotional and financial sense.
41. The artist didn’t have the funds to pay for professional models, and given the overall lack of human interaction in his life, finding friends to pose for him would have been just as difficult.
42. Vincent and Paul Gauguin lived together for a while in France.
43. Their relationship was kinda homosexual.
44. Medical biographers agree that his adulthood included periods of hypersexuality, hyposexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality.
45. Van Gogh described their bond as “electric”.
46. Some believe that Gauguin cut Van Gogh’s ear.
47. The exact sequence of events which led to Van Gogh’s mutilation of his ear is not known.
48. The story goes like this: The following days saw heavy rain, leading to the two men being shut in the Yellow House. Gauguin reported that Van Gogh followed when Gauguin left the house for a walk, and “rushed towards me, an open razor in his hand”.  Gauguin was almost certainly absent from the Yellow House that night, most likely in a hotel.
49. After the altercation with Gauguin, Van Gogh returned to his room, where he was assaulted by voices and severed his left ear with a razor (either wholly or in part; accounts differ causing severe bleeding.
50. He bandaged the wound, wrapped the ear in paper, and delivered the package to a woman at a brothel Van Gogh and Gauguin both frequented.
51. Van Gogh was found unconscious the next morning by a policeman and taken to hospital, where Félix Rey, a young doctor still in training, treated him. The ear was delivered to the hospital, but Rey did not attempt to reattach it as too much time had passed.
52. Van Gogh had a mental breakdown in the winter of 1888, and checked himself into an asylum – the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
53. Starry-Night was painted there.
54. Starry Night is considered his most iconic piece of art, and one of the most iconic painting of all time.
55. The official statement for his death was suicide by using a gun.
56. The gun Van Gogh was reputed to have used was rediscovered in 1965 and was auctioned, on 19 June 2019, as “the most famous weapon in art history”.
57. The gun sold for €162,500 (£144,000; $182,000), almost three times more than expected.
58. However, co-authors of van Gogh’s biography theorize that he was accidentally shot by a young teen who used to mock him. Feeling that the boy had done him a favor, the authors suggest that van Gogh never attempted to seek help for the wound.
59. Evidence to support this idea includes the absence of any gun or painting supplies in the field where the shooting supposedly took place, and a man reporting hearing a gunshot closer to the inn where van Gogh was that day, rather than the field.
60. His sister-in-law made him famous