Vincent van Gogh

📍Markt 26, 4880 Zundert, North Brabant, Netherlands

“I was born Vincent Willem van Gogh on the 30th of March 1853 in Zundert, a village in the Dutch province of North Brabant, the son of Theodorus van Gogh, a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Brabant landscape — the flat fields, the birches, the potato farmers, the Protestant austerity — entered my painting before I had training to express it. I worked as an art dealer and then as a missionary before beginning to paint at twenty-seven. The Potato Eaters was a Brabant painting: the dark colours, the rough hands, the dignity of labour. I went to Paris, then Arles, then Saint-Rémy, then Auvers-sur-Oise, where I died in July 1890 at thirty-seven. Eight hundred and sixty paintings in ten years. Zundert was the beginning and the light of the south was the revelation.”

Sources: Naifeh, S. & Smith, G. Van Gogh: The Life (2011), Random House; van Gogh, V. The Letters (2009), Thames & Hudson