I am a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. In just over a decade I made about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings: landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits in bold colour and expressive brushwork.
In early 1890 my art broke through with critics and peers: Albert Aurier called me a genius in the Mercure de France, Les XX invited me to Brussels, and Monet judged my ten paintings the best at the Indépendants.
In my last weeks, at Auvers-sur-Oise in May–July 1890, I painted about 70 oils in as many days — wheat fields, Portrait of Dr Gachet, my only etching, Daubigny's Garden and Wheatfield with Crows.
Portraiture is my greatest interest in art. I use colour to capture a sitter's emotions and character rather than a photographic likeness — the Roulin family, five versions of La Berceuse.
At Saint-Rémy, with my subjects limited to the clinic, its garden and supervised walks, I turned to cypresses and olive trees: fifteen cypress canvases, at least fifteen olive groves, and The Starry Night.
In 1888 I leased the Yellow House in Arles and began its Décoration, a series of paintings for an artists' studio I hoped to share with Gauguin — probably the most ambitious design effort I ever undertook.
On arriving in Arles in 1888 I painted 14 Flowering Orchards swiftly, mastering light by subduing shadows and painting the blossoming trees as if they were the light source — the start of my personal style in art.
My time in Arles was my most prolific period of art: 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings and watercolours, rich in yellow, ultramarine and mauve, made between February 1888 and May 1889.
At the end of 1887 I arranged an exhibition with Bernard, Anquetin and probably Toulouse-Lautrec at the Grand-Bouillon Restaurant du Chalet in Montmartre, where young artists sold work and argued about art and culture.
I painted two series of sunflowers — flowers on the ground in Paris in 1887, bouquets in a vase in Arles in 1888 — the second as four versions in one week to show Gauguin my art and working methods.
In Paris I rebuilt my palette: I studied Blanc's colour theory, took up Pointillist dots from Signac, and set complementary pairs like blue and orange side by side until my art turned bright.
After Charles Blanc's treatise I came to believe colour goes beyond description and carries feeling, and I built my art on it: garish reds and greens for The Night Café, yellow for emotional truth.
In May 1885 I answered a Paris dealer's interest with The Potato Eaters and a series of peasant character studies, the culmination of nearly 200 oil paintings made in two years at Nuenen.
