Vincent van Gogh was born 171 years ago today. This is his only photograph, taken when he was 19 in 1873. No other photos purported to be of him are authenticated. According to the Van Gogh Museum's website, the artist felt that photographs "lacked life," and so all the other pictures of him are his self-portraits.
The first painting is one of his earliest self-portraits (from the fall of 1886) and the first in which he depicts himself as an artist. Historians disagree which of the other two paintings was his last self-portrait. The first painting is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The second painting sold to a private collector for $71.5 million in 1998. The third painting is in the Musee d'Orsay. He painted nearly 900 oil paintings in his brief life, including 40 self-portraits..... Poor van Gogh, broke and suffering from mental illness, never knew the love and interest that his works would inspire. The way mental illness works, though, he may very well have disbelieved it.
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