Vincent van Gogh — Biography Reading Comprehension Lesson

Reading Passage

Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was born on March 30, 1853, in Zundert, a small village in the Netherlands. He was the eldest surviving child of a Dutch Reformed pastor and grew up in a devout, culturally aware household. As a young man, he worked for an art dealer in The Hague, London, and Paris, and then briefly as a teacher and lay preacher before deciding at age 27 to become an artist. He had no formal art training until relatively late, but he threw himself into learning with extraordinary intensity — studying anatomy, perspective, and color theory and filling sketchbooks with thousands of drawings.

Van Gogh’s early work, done in the Netherlands in dark, earthy tones, focused on peasant life and labor. His first major painting, The Potato Eaters (1885), depicts a peasant family sharing a humble meal by lamplight — a dark, powerful image of rural hardship. In 1886, he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, an art dealer who would support Vincent financially throughout his life. In Paris, Van Gogh encountered Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and his palette transformed dramatically — he began using vivid, pure colors applied in bold, visible brushstrokes.

In February 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France, seeking the bright southern light he craved. There he produced an astonishing burst of creativity — paintings of sunflowers, orchards, bedrooms, and starry nights. He invited fellow painter Paul Gauguin to join him, hoping to found an artists’ colony. The arrangement collapsed in December 1888 in a famous crisis: during a breakdown, Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear and brought it to a woman at a nearby house. Gauguin fled, and Van Gogh was hospitalized. He voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy the following year.

Remarkably, some of Van Gogh’s greatest paintings were made while he was at the asylum. The Starry Night (June 1889) — with its swirling sky over a sleeping village — was painted from memory in his room at Saint-Rémy. In May 1890, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris, where he painted feverishly — producing more than 70 works in 70 days, including the turbulent Wheatfield with Crows. On July 27, 1890, he shot himself in a wheat field and died two days later at the age of 37, with Theo at his side.

During his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only one painting. Today his works sell for hundreds of millions of dollars and are among the most recognized images in the world. The Starry Night, Sunflowers, and his self-portraits are cultural icons. He is celebrated not only for the beauty of his paintings but for the raw emotional power he poured into them — his art made visible the turbulence and intensity of his inner life. His work was a major influence on Expressionism and on virtually every subsequent movement in modern art. He is considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived.

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