In July of 1890 at the tender age of 37Vincent van Gogh after suffering most of his life from severe depression walked into a field near where he was staying in Auvers-sur-Oise and shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died two days later with his brother Theo at his side.
Van Gogh painted approximately 900 paintings before that little fieldtrip, along with over 1,100 sketches & drawings, and all within the last ten years of his life.
During his lifetime he sold exactly one painting, "Red Vineyard at Arles" for approximately 400 francs, or about $100 US.
"I feel...a failure. That's it as far as I'm concerned...I feel that this is the destiny that I accept, that will never change."
Strangely, we know a great deal about old Vincent, much more than you would expect for somebody almost completely unknown during his own life. We know so much because we have over 600 letters he wrote, mostly to his brother (and frequent financial supporter) Theo.
A generation ago you could have devoted years of study to tracking down and translating van Gogh's letters. Today I stumbled across a website (in English) with over 16,000 searchable words, 62 index topics, 1284 topic citations, and 1223 artwork citations.
van Gogh's Letters, Unabridged & Annotated:
http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/
Some highlights:
"If a peasant painting smells of bacon, smoke, potato steam, fine - that's not unhealthy - if a stable reeks of manure - all right, that's what a stable is all about - if a field has the smell of ripe corn or potatoes or of guano and manure - that's properly healthy, especially for city dwellers. Such pictures might prove helpful to them."
"We can be fairly sure that the Marseilles artist who committed suicide in no way did it under the influence of absinthe, for the simple reason that no one is likely to have offered him any and he could not have had anything to buy it with. Besides, he would not have drunk it purely for pleasure, but because, being ill already, he kept himself going with it."
"A peasant girl, in her patched and dusty blue skirt and bodice which have acquired the most delicate shades from the weather, wind and sun, is better looking - in my opinion - than a lady. But if she dons a lady's clothes, then her authenticity is gone. A peasant in his fustian clothes out in the fields [is] better looking than when he goes to church on Sunday in a kind of gentleman's coat."
"Never think it gives me pleasure to notice something wrong; it grieves me and gives me so much pain that at times I cannot keep it to myself."
[It's becoming harder and harder to remember a world without instant access to unimaginable (and unmanageable) amounts of information. God Bless The Internet, but how did we live before it?]
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