Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night

Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Date: 1888
Technique: Oil on canvas, 92 x 72.5 cm

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Date: 1889
Technique: Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm

Vincent van Gogh, Country Churchyard and Old Church Tower

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Date: 1885
Technique: Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm

Vincent van Gogh, Miners Women Carrying Sacks (The Bearers of the Burden)

Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo

Date: 1881
Technique: Pencil and ink on paper, 43 x 60 cm

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (De Aardappeleters)

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Date: 1885
Technique: Oil on canvas, 82 x 114 cm

The Potato Eaters (Dutch: De Aardappeleters) is an oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted in April 1885 in Nuenen, Netherlands. It is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The version at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo is a preliminary oil sketch, and he also made a version as a lithograph. In 1885 van Gogh made several versions of The Potato Eaters.

During March and the beginning of April 1885 he sketched studies for the painting, and corresponded with his brother Theo, who was not impressed with his current work or the sketches Van Gogh sent him in Paris. He worked on the painting from April 13 until the beginning of May, when it was mostly done except for minor changes which he made with a small brush later the same year.

Van Gogh said he wanted to depict peasants as they really were. He deliberately chose coarse and ugly models, thinking that they would be natural and unspoiled in his finished work: "You see, I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and — that they have thus honestly earned their food. I wanted it to give the idea of a wholly different way of life from ours — civilized people. So I certainly don’t want everyone just to admire it or approve of it without knowing why."

Writing to his sister Willemina two years later in Paris, Van Gogh still considered The Potato Eaters his most successful painting: "What I think about my own work is that the painting of the peasants eating potatoes that I did in Nuenen is after all the best thing I did".[4] However, the work was criticized by his friend Anthon van Rappard soon after it was painted. This was a blow to van Gogh's confidence as an emerging artist, and he wrote back to his friend, "you...had no right to condemn my work in the way you did" (July 1885), and later, "I am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it." (August 1885).

Vincent van Gogh, Flying Fox

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Date: 1886
Technique: Oil on canvas

Vincent van Gogh, Funeral in the Snow near the Old Tower

Private collection

Date: 1883
Technique: Black chalk, pen, brown ink, washed

Vincent van Gogh, Lane of Poplars at Sunset

Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

Date: 1884
Technique: Oil on canvas, 45.8 x 32.2 cm

Source

Vincent van Gogh, The Prison Courtyard

The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Музей изобразительных искусств им. А.С. Пушкина)

Date: 1890
Technique: Oil on canvas, 80 x 64 cm

Van Gogh painted The Prison Courtyard while “imprisoned” himself, in the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint Rémy. He died 5 months later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the culmination of his long struggle with physical and mental illness.

The Prison Courtyard expresses the artist’s hopelessness and despair. In the lower part of the painting, thirty-three inmates form a human corona, pacing heads down, in defeated rote and joyless resignation. In spite of the shared misery and monochrome prison garb, they are not uniformly anonymous; some faces can be deciphered, particularly the one in the center, whose blond hair is lighted by an imperceptible sun’s ray. That is van Gogh himself in what has been interpreted as a “metaphoric self-portrait”.

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Vincent van Gogh, Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Date: 1885-86
Technique: Oil on canvas, 32 x 24.5 cm

This curious and somewhat macabre little painting is undated. It was probably executed in the winter of 1885-86, during Van Gogh’s stay in Antwerp. He had traveled there from Nuenen in November 1885, and in January 1886 – in order to have the opportunity to draw and paint after the live model – he enrolled at the art academy.

Students at Antwerp’s traditional academy learned by copying prints and studying plaster casts. After they had progressed sufficiently, they were permitted to study the live model. Skeletons were often used to help them understand human anatomy.

This skull with a cigarette was likely meant as a kind of joke, and probably also as a comment on conservative academic practice.

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Source 2