Vincent van Gogh

Supposedly he painted this right after leaving hospital — the print behind him nods to the Japanese woodblocks he collected.

He was living in an asylum in the south of France when he made this, and it's roughly the view out of his bedroom window before dawn, with a village added that wasn't actually there. According to Wikipedia he didn't rate it much himself — in his letters he wrote it off as a failure.

He made this during the year he spent in an asylum in the south of France — apparently he kept painting almost the whole time he was there, mostly working from whatever the grounds and the valley around the place gave him to look at.

He was on a run of night pictures around this time, and wrote to his brother about wanting to do darkness in colour instead of black — that's the bit I keep seeing quoted, anyway. The spot was supposedly a two-minute walk from the house he was renting.

This one apparently sold at a record-breaking auction price back in the 1980s, which is part of why it ended up in a Tokyo collection instead of a European one.

This one, apparently, was one of three repeats he made a few months after the originals — meant as a gift for Gauguin, though it never actually reached him.

I couldn't find much background on this one, no anecdote to pass along — if anyone knows the story behind that lit candle, I'd love to hear it.

There's a story that this was the very last thing he painted, and from what I can find that isn't right — it's from his final weeks, but other canvases came after. The long, letterbox shape wasn't a one-off either; he did a run of them that same summer.

Apparently he managed this whole night scene without touching black paint once — just blues, greens, and that one yellow. He also set the easel up outside and painted it after dark on the actual square, which wasn't really how night scenes got made at the time.

This came out of a run of flower paintings made in his last year, while he was living in an asylum in the south of France and painting whatever was brought to his room. The background was pink once, according to the museum's own notes — the red pigment faded out of it — so the pale white we get isn't the colour he actually mixed.

The aim, from what I can find, was people who looked like they'd actually dug the food sitting in front of them — in a letter he said he wanted the whole thing to smell of bacon, smoke and potato steam. It got pulled apart when it was new, apparently even by a painter friend of his, mostly over the drawing being off.

From what I can find he was still teaching himself to draw when he made this — no training, just prints of an older painter's peasant scenes copied over and over until the figures came right. He kept going back to this same striding sower for years afterwards.

Painted as a present for his brother's newborn son, who'd been given his name. They say the family hung it over their bed. The flat, bright look of it supposedly owes a lot to the Japanese prints he collected.