Vincent van Gogh
He failed as an art dealer, as a teacher and as a lay preacher among Belgian miners; he took up the brush at twenty-seven and had ten years in which to work. The dark Dutch painting gave way in Paris to the colour of the impressionists and in Arles to the light of the south — “Sunflowers”, “The Yellow House”, “The Starry Night”, painted in the asylum at Saint-Rémy. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime and lived on money from his brother Theo, to whom he wrote more than six hundred letters; they are why his life is known from the inside. In July 1890 he shot himself and died at thirty-seven; the nine hundred canvases he left are now among the most expensive in the world.
He was born in Zundert on 30 March 1853 at 11:00 local mean time; the hour is entered in the parish register. Exactly a year earlier his parents had a stillborn first son, given the same name.