Vincent Van Gogh Research Paper

Vincent van Gogh was an amazing post-impressionist painter who was poor and went practically unrecognized his whole life. Now, he is most known for the emotion, beauty, and color that he put into his work that extremely influenced 20th century art. While many know that Van Gogh was a tad bit on the crazy side, not many people have taken the time to understand why he was like this. Like almost everyone, his childhood had a major role in how he developed as a person. Then, in his late teens and throughout his 20s he was constantly moving from place to place trying to decide who he was in life. Finally, in his early 30s he began painting his most famous artworks along with the start of him ingesting medications and toxic liquids. Van Gogh went through his whole life believing that he was a mentally-ill outcast who was unloved, and thought of himself to be a failure. He had …show more content…
Van Gogh soon became addicted to green stuff. In 1888, his mental and self-inflicted illnesses, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and lead poisoning, started to show more, now that he was not in control of his actions while under the influence. He frequently had fits of rage when things did not go his way and those lead to seizures. Van Gogh was born with a brain lesion which was the main cause of his epilepsy. His physicians treated him with digitalis which is quite toxic, highly addictive, and an overdose can actually cause seizures, nausea, and cause a patient's vision to be yellowed; hence the reason van Gogh painted with lots of yellows in his work. With the frequent overdoses of digitalis and absinthe, he was never in his right mind. One night, a friend went to check on Vincent and had found him in a state of delusion with a razor in his hand. When the friend fled, van Gogh wandered around and had cut off a bit of his earlobe and offered it to a local prostitute, asking her to keep it