Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter who is among the best-known artists in history. His expressive depictions of street scenes, sunflowers, and portraits feature vivid palettes and lively brushwork, as seen in his seminal work Starry Night (1889). “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully,” he once said. Born on March 30, 1853 in Zundert, Netherlands, he worked as an art dealer at the firm Goupil & Cie in both London and Paris as a young man. Disillusioned with his life and destitute after leaving the firm, he returned to his family and took up drawing. His brother Theo van Gogh helped him get a studio in The Hague and paid for painting classes with Anton Mauve. It was Mauve that introduced Van Gogh to the work of Jean-François Millet, and it was Millet’s paintings of peasants that led the artist to move to the village of Nuenen, Netherlands. While working there, he portrayed the farmers and laborers in dark Rembrandt-like tones. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he relied on his brother for both emotional and financial support. In Paris, Van Gogh was introduced to Impressionism and soon lightened his palette and adopted many of the stylizations found in Japanese wood-block prints. In the fall of 1888, he spent 9 weeks living in the small Provençal town of Arles with the painter Paul Gauguin. It was during this period that Van Gogh infamously cut off his own ear in a fit of mental anguish. A prolific painter, he produced over 2,100 works in little more than a decade. Van Gogh died at the age of 37 on July 29, 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Today, his works are featured in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam which is entirely dedicated to his oeuvre.