Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853, in the Netherlands, and died in France on July 29, 1890, at the age of 37, still young. He was a very prolific artist, as he produced around 2,400 works, including drawings and paintings. He made at least 43 self-portraits, among which is one of the most impressive and famous, Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear (2), from 1889, painted after having cut off his own earlobe during an argument with his friend Gauguin, who delivered it wrapped in a handkerchief to a woman from a brothel in Arles, whom he frequently visited.
Van Gogh, along with Cézanne and Gauguin, a post-impressionist group, is one of the closest antecedents to the origin of modern art, particularly expressionism and fauvism, in his case; however, at the time he was misunderstood and rejected by the society in which he had to live, and ironically, after his death he begins to enjoy the glory that he didn’t know in life, but that somehow he intuited, since in one of those letters sent to his brother Theo, an art dealer, ─with whom he had extensive written communication, a valuable testimony of the artist’s life─, he says that “If what I do is good, then we will not lose anything in terms of money, because just like wine stored in the cellar, it will be normal for it to reach certain appraisal.”
Over the years, that wine (his work) to which Van Gogh referred, acquires an extraordinary value both economically and artistically, which he didn’t get to enjoy. It is said that Van Gogh, who before being an artist was an art dealer in a gallery, managed to sell only one work in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard (1), from 1888, the only painting that until now there is information about having sold to a Belgian painter and collector friend of him, Anna Boch, because many of his works were exchanged for food or sold to a junk dealer as fabrics to repaint, not as works, and thus, with the little money he acquired, he covered his basic needs, and even, in some cases, shared with some other needy person or animal. He did this when the money sent by his brother Theo didn’t arrive, who helped him financially unconditionally until his last days. It is said that for ethical reasons Theo didn’t sell his brother Van Gogh’s works, which he kept in storage at his home.
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