If you ask anyone the name of some famous painters, Vincent Van Gogh is among those names
Van Gogh’s oeuvre is very large, that’s why we have selected some of his most outstanding and recognized artworks
15 Outstanding Artworks by Vincent Van Gogh
1-The Starry night
The Starry Night is an oil on canvas. Painted in June 1889, it depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village.
It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh’s magnum opus. Starry Night is one of the most recognized paintings in Western art.
2- Irises
Irises is one of several paintings of lilies by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, and is part of a series of paintings he made at the Saint Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in the last year before his death in 1890.
Van Gogh began painting Lilies within a month of entering the asylum, in May 1889, working from life in the hospital garden. There is not the high tension seen in his later works. He called painting “the lightning rod of my illness” because he felt he could avoid going mad if he kept painting.
The painting is probably influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts, like many of his works and those of other artists of the time. Similarities are with the strong contours, the unusual angles, including close-ups, and also the flat local color (not modeled after the fall of light). The painting is full of softness and lightness. Irises is full of life without tragedy.
He considered this painting a study, so there are probably no known drawings of it, although Van Gogh’s brother Theo thought it better and promptly submitted it to the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants in September 1889, along with Starry Night over the Rhone. He wrote to Vincent about the exhibition, “It is a work that catches the eye from afar. The lilies are a beautiful study full of air and life.” The painting is one of his best known works.
3- Café Terrace at night
Café Terrace, at night is an oil painting from 1888 d. It is also known as Café Terrace in the Forum Square and, when it was first exhibited in 1891, it was titled Coffee, in the Evening (Café, le soir).
Van Gogh painted The Cafe Terrace, at Night in Arles, France, in mid-September 1888. The painting is unsigned, but is described and mentioned by the artist in three letters.
Visitors to the site can stand at the northeast corner of the Forum Square, where the artist set up his easel. The site was renovated in 1990 and 1991 to reproduce Van Gogh’s painting. He looked south toward the artificially lit terrace of the popular café, as well as into the enforced darkness of the rue du Palais, which led to a building structure (left, not photographed) and, beyond this structure, to the tower of a former church that is now the Musée Lapidaire.
To the right, Van Gogh indicated an illuminated tent and some branches of the surrounding trees, but omitted the remains of the Roman monuments just beyond this small tent.
The painting is now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo (Netherlands).
4- Bedroom in Arles
Bedroom in Arles (French: La Chambre à Arles; Dutch: Slaapkamer te Arles) is the title given to each of three similar paintings by Van Gogh.
Van Gogh’s title for this composition was simply The Room (French: La Chambre à coucher). There are three authentic versions described in his letters, easily distinguishable from each other by the paintings on the wall to the right.
The painting depicts Van Gogh’s bedroom at number 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, known as the Yellow House. The door on the right led to the upper floor and staircase; the door on the left was that of the guest room he had prepared for Gauguin; the window on the front wall overlooked Place Lamartine and its public gardens
This room was not rectangular, but trapezoidal, with an obtuse angle on the left corner of the front wall and an acute angle on the right.
5- Daubigny´s Garden
Daubigny´s garden, painted three times by van Gogh, represents the enclosed garden of Charles-FrançoisDaubigny, a painter whom Van Gogh admired throughout his life.
Van Gogh began with a small study of a section of the garden. He then worked on two double-square paintings of the entire walled garden. The paintings were made in Auvers between May and July 1890, during the last months of his life
The three paintings are entitled Daubigny´s garden and are distinguished by the museums in which they reside: Kunstmuseum Basel, Hiroshima Museum of Art and Van Gogh Museum.
6- The Potato Eaters
The Potato Eaters (Dutch: De Aardappeleters) is an oil painting by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted in April 1885 in Nuenen (The Netherlands) that is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam
The original oil sketch of the painting is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, and he also made lithographs of the image, which are held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting is considered one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces.
7- The Night Café
The Night Café (French: Le Café de nuit) is an oil painting painted in September 1888 in Arles. Its title is inscribed in the lower right corner below the signature
The painting is owned by Yale University and is currently in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
The interior depicted is the Café de la Gare at 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel Ginoux and his wife Marie, who in November 1888 posed for Van Gogh and Gauguin’s Arlésienne; a little later, Joseph Ginoux evidently posed for both artists as well.
8- Starry Night over the Rhone
Starry Night (September 1888, French: La Nuit étoilée), commonly known as Starry Night over the Rhone, is one of Van Gogh’s paintings of Arles at night.
It was painted on the banks of the Rhone, which was only a minute or two walk from the Yellow House on Place Lamartine, which Van Gogh had rented at the time. The night sky and the effects of light at night were the subject of some of van Gogh’s most famous paintings, such as Café Terrace at Night (painted earlier the same month) and the June 1889 Saint-Remy canvas, The Starry Night.
A sketch of the painting is included in a letter van Gogh sent to his friend Eugène Boch on October 2, 1888.
The Starry Night, now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, was first exhibited in 1889 at the annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in Paris
It was exhibited along with Irises, which was added by Vincent’s brother Theo, although Vincent had proposed including one of his paintings of the public gardens of Arles.
9- Sorrowing Old Man
Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity´s Gate) is an oil painting by Vincent van Gogh made in 1890 in Saint-Rémy de Provence on the basis of a first lithograph
The painting was completed in early May, at a time when he was convalescing from a serious relapse of his health, about two months before his death, which is generally accepted as a suicide.
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10- Sorrow
Sorrow is a drawing made in 1882.
The work, created two years after Van Gogh decided to become an artist, depicts a 32-year-old pregnant woman, Clasina Maria Hoornik, familiarly known as Sien. Sorrow is widely recognized as a masterpiece of drawing, the culmination of a long and sometimes uncertain apprenticeship by Van Gogh in learning his craft.
The drawing is part of the Garman Ryan Collection held at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. It was previously in the private collection of artist Sally Ryan, who had the work hanging in her permanent suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
It belongs to a series using Sien Hoornik as a model. It is mentioned in several letters from Van Gogh, who seems to think highly of it, considering it an important work and describing it as “the best figure I have ever drawn” In a letter dated July 1882, Van Gogh states, “I want to make drawings that move some people. Pain is a small beginning […] at least there is something that comes directly from my own heart.”
11- The Yellow House
The Yellow House (Dutch: Het gele huis), also called The Street (Dutch: De straat), is an oil painting from 1888.
The house was the right wing of number 2 Place Lamartine in Arles, France, where, on May 1, 1888, van Gogh rented four rooms
He occupied two large ones on the first floor to serve as his atelier (workshop) and kitchen, and on the second floor, two smaller ones facing Place Lamartine. The second floor window closest to the corner, with the two open shutters, is that of van Gogh’s guest room, where Paul Gauguin lived for nine weeks from the end of October 1888. Behind the next window, with the shutters almost closed, is van Gogh’s bedroom. The two small rooms in the back were rented by van Gogh at a later time.
Van Gogh indicated that the restaurant where he used to eat was in the pink-painted building near the left edge of the painting (28 Place Lamartine). It was run by the widow Venissac, who was also Van Gogh’s landlady, and who owned several of the other buildings depicted
To the right of the Yellow House, the Avenue Montmajour descends to the two railroad bridges. The first line (with a train that has just passed) served the local connection to Lunel, which is on the opposite (i.e., right) bank of the Rhone River
The other line was owned by the P.-L.-M. In the left foreground is the corner of the pedestrian walkway that surrounded one of the public gardens in the Place Lamartine. The ditch leading up Avenue Montmajour from the left towards the bridges was used for the gas pipe, which allowed Van Gogh, a little later, to have gas lighting installed in his studio.
The building was badly damaged in an Allied bombing raid on June 25, 1944, and was subsequently demolished.
12- Wheat Field with Cypresses
Wheat Field with Cy presses is one of three similar oil paintings by Vincent van Gogh from 1889, part of his Wheat Field series
All were exhibited at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole Mental Sanatorium in Saint-Rémy, near Arles, France, where Van Gogh was a voluntary patient from May 1889 to May 1890. The works are inspired by the view from the window of the Sanatorium towards the Alpilles mountains.
13- Sunflowers
Sunflowers (original title, in French: Tournesols) is the title of two series of still lifes by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. The first series, executed in Paris in 1887, depicts flowers lying on the ground, while the second, executed a year later in Arles, shows a bouquet of sunflowers in a vase
In the artist’s mind, both sets were linked by the name of his friend Paul Gauguin, who acquired two of the Paris versions. Some eight months later, van Gogh hoped to welcome and impress Gauguin again with the Sunflowers, which were part of the Decoration for the Painted Yellow House that he prepared for the guest room of his Arles home, where Gauguin was to stay
After Gauguin’s departure, van Gogh imagined the two main versions as wings of the Triptych of the Berceuse, and eventually included them in his exhibition Les XX in Brussels.
14- Portrait of Dr. Gachet
Portrait of Dr. Gachet is one of the Dutch artist’s most revered paintings
It depicts Dr. Paul Gachet, a homeopathic physician and artist with whom Van Gogh resided after a stay in an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence
Gachet cared for Van Gogh during the last months of his life. Two authenticated versions of the portrait exist, both painted in June 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise. Both show Gachet seated at a table and resting his head on his right arm, but they differ easily in color and style. There is also an engraving.
The first version was acquired by the Frankfurt Städel in 1911 and subsequently confiscated and sold by Hermann Göring. In May 1990, it was sold at auction for $82.5 million ($171.1 million today) to Ryoei Saito, making it the most expensive painting in the world at the time. It then disappeared from public view and the Städel was unable to locate it in 2019. The second version was owned by Gachet and was bequeathed to France by his heirs
Despite discussions about its authenticity, it now hangs in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
15- The Red Vineyard
The Red Vineyard at Arles is an oil painting painted on a piece of privately printed burlap in early November 1888. It depicts workers in a vineyard and is the only painting known by name that van Gogh sold during his lifetime.
The Red Vineyard was first exhibited at the annual Les XX exhibition of 1890 in Brussels and sold for 400 francs (equivalent to about $2,000 in today’s dollars) to the Belgian painter and collector Anna Boch, a member of Les XX
Anna was the sister of Eugène Boch, another Impressionist painter and also a friend of Van Gogh, who had painted Boch’s portrait (Le Peintre aux Étoiles) in Arles in the fall of 1888
In a later letter to his brother Theo discussing the sale, Van Gogh admitted with some embarrassment that the Bochs paid the sticker price of the Les XX Exhibition of 1890, when in fact they probably should have gotten a “friend’s price.”
Later, in 1909, Ivan Morozov bought the painting from a Paris art gallery. After the Russian Revolution, the painting was nationalized by the Bolsheviks and eventually passed to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where it resides today.
