By Jan Huner

From December 11, 2009 until March 28, 2010 the National Museum of History in Taipei will be the venue of an exhibition of drawings and paintings by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). The 80 drawings and 16 paintings are all part of the permanent collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum in The Netherlands.

Few people know that Vincent van Gogh only painted during the last 8 years of his life. He made his first independent watercolor and painted studies in the summer of 1882. Initially, following in the footsteps of Millet and Breton, Vincent resolved to be a painter of peasant life. In part because local clergymen continually thwart his attempts to find models, Vincent moved to the Belgian city of Antwerp in November 1885. He would never return to his native country. In November 1886 Vincent arrived in Paris to live with Theo in Montmartre, an artists' quarter. There, Theo acquaints Vincent with the works of Claude Monet and other Impressionists. It is in these works that Vincent van Gogh found the inspiration to develop his very personal and powerful expressions of what he saw around him and what he experienced in his mind.

In December 1888, while living and working with Gauguin in Arles in the south of France, Van Gogh experienced a psychotic episode in which he threatened Gauguin with a razor and later cut off a piece of his own left ear. Fearful of a relapse, in May 1889 he voluntarily admitted himself to the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, 15 miles from Arles. He was to stay there for a year, producing no fewer than 150 paintings, and then moved to Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris. In June 1890, Vincent visited Theo in Paris, who warned him that he could no longer count on his financial support. Deeply troubled by this, Vincent shot himself in the chest a few weeks later. His grave, and that of his brother Theo, can still be seen in the graveyard of the church in Auvers that he painted several times in the weeks before.

Exhibition Times:
9 am-9 pm (Closed on 2/13 Chinese New Year's Eve)
Exhibition Place:
National Museum of History
Nanhai Rd. #49 TEL: 02-2361-0270
Ticket Purchase:
Online pre-purchase: please visit Era Tickets (www.ticket.com.tw)
At the exhibition: a small number of tickets will be sold at the National Museum of History exhibition entrance
Ticket Prices: NT$150-500