Among the great painters of the late nineteenth century, Van Gogh was perhaps the least understood artist during his own lifetime and the most admired in the years that followed. He never sold a painting while he was alive, yet now his masterpieces rank among the most valuable and revered.
During Van Gogh's early years, he worked in the vein of popular realism that was then much in vogue, carrying realism to a point where it seemed that a new school of Germanic Expressionism was about to be born. But from the time of his arrival in Paris, he followed the Impressionists, employing light and color in new ways, foreshadowing the Fauvist movement. In the last three years of his life, he produced his most personal paintings and revealed himself not only to be one of the greatest innovators of modern art, but also a precursor of the modern troubled spirit, plunged in torment, torn by anguish, desperately seeking an answer to the problems of destiny.