Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

Not the usual Van Goghs

Mar 30, 2011

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by

cparker

in Gallery and Museum Art

Browse through a dozen different books on Vincent van Gogh and chances are you’ll see many of the same paintings again and again.

You might be tempted to think he had a limited oeuvre, but nothing could be further from the truth. Van Gogh was astonishingly prolific, particularly in light of the fact that his active career barely spanned 10 years. The books, except for the most complete, have simply chosen to play it safe by repeating his “greatest hits”.

In honor of Van Gogh’s birthday, here is a modest selection of some works you don’t often see. These were taken from the Vincent van Gogh Gallery website (see my post here), where you can find many more.

Vincent van Gogh Gallery

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Some relevant Lines and Colors posts:

Vincent van Gogh Gallery

Van Gogh’s self-portraits

Tilt-Shift Van Gogh

Van Gogh’s Letters

Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night

Van Gogh’s Drawings

How Van Gogh Made His Mark

Restoration of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom

Van Gogh’s yellows turning brown

Van Gogh and Picasso on The power of Art

Comments

7 responses to “Not the usual Van Goghs”

edwald

March 31, 2011

Thank you for this wonderful posting.
Van Gogh is my favorite painter, and I have been frustrated by the repetitive scarcity of his works in print -just got myself a supposed total overview of his paintings, but as you say, he also produced drawings.
Following your carefully collected links led me to a perfectly beautiful hour of browsing on an otherwise crummy morning.
Thanks!
Dave Dubé

March 31, 2011

WOW! An Oriental – complete with marginal Kanji. Simply amazing. Another great find, Charley.
Pete Bangs

March 31, 2011

Great post and nice to see a couple fo my favourites in there. It’s true what you say, does tend to be the same sunflowers and staryy night over and over again.
Stephanie Berry

March 31, 2011

Thanks for sharing these. These are fantastic. I got a Van Gogh calendar for this year and there are a couple of those never-seen-before paintings on it. Such a pleasant surprise.
Ian North

March 31, 2011

Love this! Hard to believe his career only spanned 10 years and yet his work lives on all these years later.
Susan Scheid

March 31, 2011

Somehow, in all this time, it had not registered that van Gogh’s painting life was only ten years long. Astonishing–and I thank you again for reminding us how varied his work was.
Andrew C

April 1, 2011

These are lovely. You can get so used to the same old images that you begin to forget that there is a reason Van Gogh was one of the greats. Then you can see something new, with fresh eyes, and again you can go…damn I wish I was that good.