Perhaps They’ll Listen Now

Vincent Van Gogh (30 March 1853 to 29 July 1890) –

A “crazy middle-aged Dutchman working away in southern France...”*

“In July 1890 Van Gogh put an end to his life – he was thirty-seven like Raphael, and his career as a painter had not lasted more than ten years...”*

“…the paintings on which his fame rests were all painted during three years which were interrupted by crises and despair.”*

“Van Gogh used the individual brushstrokes not only to break up the colour but also to convey his own excitement.”*

“Van Gogh was in such a frenzy of creation that he felt the urge not only to draw the radiant sun itself…but also to paint humble, restful and homely things which no-one had ever thought of as being worthy of the artist’s attention.”*

His paintings “may be described as visible poems composed with calligraphic brush strokes and symbolic colors to convey an impression of the eternal force van Gogh saw behind the screen of reality.”^

He took his life in a field of wheat that he had been painting.

[*E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (2006).] [^Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, From the Classicists to the Impressionists, (1966), p. 472.]