Van Gogh was born to religious upper middle class parents. He was driven as an adult by a strong sense of purpose, but was also thoughtful and intellectual; he was equally aware of modernist currents in art, music and literature. He was well travelled and spent several years in his 20s working for a firm of art dealers in The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught in England at Isleworth and Ramsgate.
He drew as a child, but spent years drifting in ill health and solitude, and did not paint until his late twenties. Most of his best-known works were completed during the last two years of his life. Deeply religious as a younger man, he worked from 1879 as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he sketched people from the local community. His first major work was 1885's The Potato Eaters, from a time when his palette mainly consisted of sombre earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid colouration that distinguished his later paintings.
The Restaurant de la Sirène at Asnière, 1887
In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later, he moved to the south of France and was inspired by the region's strong sunlight. His paintings grew brighter in colour, and he developed the unique and highly recognisable style that became fully realised during his stay in Arles in 1888. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings. After years of anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness he died aged 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The extent to which his mental health affected his painting has been widely debated.
The widespread and popular realisation of his significance in the history of modern art began after his adoption by the early 20th-century German Expressionists and Fauves. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticise his ill health, art historians see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence caused by frequent mental sickness. His posthumous reputation grew steadily; a romanticised version developed in the 20 years after his death when seen as an important but overlooked artist compared to other members of his generation.
Still Life with Plaster Statuette, a Rose and Two Novels, December 1887
His reputation advanced with the emergence of the Fauvist movement in Europe and post WWII American respect for symbols of "heroic individualism" that was attractive to early US modernists and especially to the highly successful abstract expressionists of the 1950s; New York's MOMA launched major retrospectives early in the rehabilitation of his reputation, and made large acquisitions. By this stage his standing as a great artist and the romanticism of his life were firmly established.
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