In 1990, the oil painting Portrait of Dr. Gachet fetched a hefty $82.5 million in three minutes.
"Beardless Self-Portrait" was made for $71.5 million, "Iris" was made for $53 million, and "Sunflower" was made for $40 million.
A letter auctioned at the Dutch venue ended up selling for £750,000, the most expensive letter in history.
These all come from the same person, the genius painter Van Gogh, who was a representative of Post-Impressionism and was hailed as one of the most outstanding artists of the 19th century.
People worship him and take pride in buying his paintings, but none of this has anything to do with Van Gogh.
During his lifetime, Van Gogh was poor, his paintings were never appreciated by the public, and the only work he sold was "Red Vineyard", which cost only $1,000.
Van Gogh's whole life was lonely and rejected, and his parents regarded him as a.
Van Gogh was born in 1853 in Zindelt, the Netherlands, to a clergyman's father who owned a large bungalow.
Van Gogh had an older brother who died at birth, and in honor of this child, his parents gave Van Gogh the same name as his brother, "Vincent".
Van Gogh's mother has been immersed in the pain of losing her son, unable to take care of Van Gogh wholeheartedly, and later having a younger sister and brother, Van Gogh can not enjoy much maternal love.
The psychological trauma caused to Van Gogh by his childhood directly affected his life.
As a child, Van Gogh had a rebellious, withdrawn personality, and was incompatible with his classmates, and he dropped out of school early.
At the age of 16, on the recommendation of his uncle, Van Gogh entered the "Guber" Branch in The Hague as an apprentice. He did a great job there, was quickly reused as a store manager, and was a completely promising young man.
If it continues to develop steadily, Van Gogh will most likely become a happy and wealthy dealer, rather than a lifelong miserable artist.
At the age of 20, because of his outstanding performance, Van Gogh was sent to London by the company to work for a salary of 90 pounds a year, which was much higher than his father, who was a priest.
However, life is impermanent, the brush of fate paints Van Gogh's life in another direction, and several of his failed relationships have become the driving force behind the scenes, pushing his life to endless darkness and abyss.
In his first year in London, Van Gogh fell in love with the landlord's 19-year-old daughter Eugenia, a tall, tough-faced girl who liked to wear a black coat.
Van Gogh fell in love with her at first sight, silently breeding love, and he thought that Eugenia liked himself.
When he finally confessed to Eugenia, eugenia refused, saying that she had made a lifelong engagement with her former tenant.
Faced with Eugenia's determination, Van Gogh's heart was occupied by a storm of despair and fell into deep depression.
Van Gogh's second love affair was that she fell in love with her cousin Kay Voss, who had just lost her husband and was carrying her 8-year-old son.
Van Gogh was very sympathetic to his cousin's plight, and this sympathy slowly turned into a deep love, but Van Gogh did not change his previous reckless pursuit of Eugenia. His abrupt and rambling confession was directly rejected by his cousin.
However, Van Gogh did not give up, but ran to his cousin's house and asked to see her. Van Gogh put his hand on the candle and said, "If you don't agree, I won't let go." His fiery love did not get a response, but was seen as crazy by everyone.
Van Gogh, who longs for love, has been frustrated one after another, and he is unwilling but helpless.
In a depressed mood, Van Gogh drank cup after cup, and a man staggered to the red light district, and then he met Xanne, an even more depressed prostitute.
Sien was not good-looking, her face was full of freckles and wrinkles, she had two births, and when she met Van Gogh, she was pregnant.
Van Gogh was deeply attracted to this bitter woman and vowed to marry her for the rest of his life.
He gave all his tenderness to Xena, and even when she scolded him and beat him, he never thought of leaving her. Because of Sien, Van Gogh contracted a venereal disease, and even then Van Gogh did not complain.
But Van Gogh was only a poor painter and could not earn money to support Xen, and she accused Van Gogh: "Can you sell that painting for money?" Don't spend money on your child's formula. ”
Van Gogh thought about it for a long time and finally decided to separate from Xena. This was the first time Van Gogh had voluntarily abandoned a woman, and the only time, which made Van Gogh feel guilty.
Van Gogh, who had suffered emotional setbacks, plunged into the religious world and wanted to become a priest or missionary.
In 1878, Van Gogh traveled to one of europe's toughest mining areas, where he wanted to bring light into the lives of poor miners through religion and faith.
He single-handedly went to the coal mine owner to ask for a raise in the miners' wages, but was not only refused by the boss, but also threatened to put him in a madhouse if he was nosy.
That hard life in the mining area gave Van Gogh a lot of inspiration.
A few years later, he painted his first masterpiece, The Potato Eater, in which potato farmers, in the dim light, extended their rough hands to the potatoes on the plate in the shadows.
People who eat potatoes
The whole painting appears dark and obscure, but it fully reflects Van Gogh's sense of social morality, and he feels that he has a certain spiritual and emotional resonance with these poor workers.
In 1986, when Van Gogh was 33 years old, he ran to Paris with "The Potato Eater" and wanted to break out of paris with this painting, but unfortunately no one wanted to buy such an eye-catching and appetite-affecting painting.
Van Gogh had to find another way out, he began to contact the Impressionists, wanted to go out of his own way of artistic innovation.
Next he painted the famous "Sunflower", Van Gogh's sunflower is only a brilliant combination of yellow colors, with a yellow background to set off the yellow sunflowers, but it does not appear monotonous.
sunflower
"Sunflower" can be called the embodiment of Van Gogh, it is like a raging fire, evoking hope and enthusiasm in everyone's heart.
In Van Gogh's eyes, yellow is the color of the sun, and sunlight symbolizes love, so it has a special meaning, and painting sunflowers in Van Gogh's short life is a manifestation of love of life.
Van Gogh loved life, but in the face of art, he went to self-destruction.
In Van Gogh's short life, there is a very important figure, that is, Van Gogh's younger brother Theo.
Theo willingly supported Van Gogh, not only to help him financially, but also to help van Gogh selflessly when he encountered emotional problems.
To a certain extent, it can be said that without Theo, there would be no Van Gogh in this world.
Van Gogh himself wrote that his younger brother Theo was his closest relative, confidant, and pillar.
During his lifetime, he wrote countless letters to Theo, in which he recounted his artistic views, the loneliness in artistic exploration, and the strong brotherhood between the lines.
Van Gogh self-portrait
Van Gogh rented a two-story cottage in the small town of Arles and painted it his favorite yellow, taking the name Yellow Cottage, which was his personal studio.
He invited his good friend Gauguin, who was 5 years taller than Van and was second only to Theo.
Initially, the relationship between the two was perfect, walking together, painting together, and even if there were differences, they only appeared as theoretical discussions.
After only a month, van Gogh and Gauguin's relationship began to deteriorate, and the two often fought over a problem, almost fighting several times. During this period, a shockingly vicious incident occurred.
In Van Gogh's most representative self-portrait, he has bandages wrapped around his head, his face is emaciated, and his eyes are deeply sunken in, revealing a lifelong expression of grief and despair.
Van Gogh's head was bandaged because one piece of his left ear was missing, which is the most famous "ear cutting incident" in art history.
There are three theories about the "ear cutting incident":
The first statement, the night Gauguin resigned and left, Van Gogh suddenly rushed up from behind, clicked in front of Gauguin and cut off his ears.
The second theory is that Van Gogh's ears were cut off by Gauguin, and in order to protect his friends, Van Gogh has always said to the outside world that he cut them himself.
The third claim has nothing to do with Gauguin, who did cut off his own ears and gave them to a prostitute named Ashar.
Whichever claim is true, it only shows that Van Gogh is being destroyed little by little by mental illness.
In 1889, Van Gogh created the famous work "Starry Night" in a mental hospital, in which the night sky, stars and cypress trees in the picture are very exaggerated, wild, strange and unpredictable.
Starry Night
The images that churn like waves and flames are full of melancholy and hallucinations, the huge curling nebula, the exaggerated starlight, and the incredible orange-yellow bright moon, which makes people feel a sense of despair and terror.
In the late spring of 1890, Van Gogh moved to the village of Orville, near Paris, where he created "The Crows in the Wheat Field", where the road seemed to be a dead end, the lines appeared to be stiff and disorderly, full of uneasiness, and the crows on the wheat field flew away, as if foreshadowing the pain and depression in Van Gogh's heart, which had reached the brink of eruption.
On July 27, 1890, at the age of 37, Van Gogh picked up a revolver and fired a shot at himself in the chest.
Covering his wounds, he staggered back to his apartment, where Van Gogh died 29 hours after the gunshots rang out. The last words he left for his brother were: "Sorrow will be everywhere."
There is another theory about van Gogh's death that he was accidentally shot by two bear children, although this claim has no conclusive evidence, but can only be regarded as a speculation.
Today, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses 200 of his paintings, more than 1,000 manuscripts, more than a dozen photocopies, four manuscripts and more than 750 letters.
Van Gogh's works were not well received, and now there are often queues here, and people from all over the world come to the museum to admire Van Gogh's paintings, which has to be said to be a kind of irony.
Van Gogh's life was full of failures of worldly significance, no fame and fortune, no love, poverty, cold treatment and destruction, and after death, he exchanged the sublime and brilliant art.
Such a life, would you want?