Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853. Being the son of a Dutch Protestant pastor, can Gogh believed he had a religious calling, and worked as a preacher in the poorest neighborhoods in London and in a coal-mining district in Belgium. His family also dealt in art, and van Gogh spent ten years working for Goupil Art Gallery. He soon developed an intellectual curiosity for contemporary art and literature. This curiosity led him to Paris where he joined with contemporaries such as Gauguin, Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec. Van Gogh proved himself a true modernist and soon developed an appreciation for the Japanese aesthetic, especially as it was expressed in wood block prints.
Van Gogh used his art as a form of communication and often expressed a deep desperation in his depictions of the simplest of subjects. He often used uneven lines and large repetitive brush strokes to create harsh patterns and distorted objects. Van Gogh said that he used color to express himself forcibly. He once wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo, when describing the color in one of his paintings "[the color] was not locally true from the point of view of the delusive realist, but color suggesting some emotion of an ardent temperament." This use of expressive color, line and pattern is especially prevalent in the works he did at Auver-sur-Oise, where he painted Thatched Cottages at Cordeville in 1890, the same year he died.
Manufactured by Laurel Ink in Seattle, WA, this 500 piece puzzle is easily framed upon completion with completed dimensions of 18 inches by 24 inches.
