Vincent van Gogh

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Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh, 1887, via Art Institute of Chicago
 

Vincent van Gogh was born in the year 1853 and

died in 1890. The Dutch painter began his career as
an artist when he was already 27 years old. Despite
the fact that Van Gogh only painted for ten years –
from 1880 to his death in 1890 – he left an
astounding number of artworks behind. He
voluntarily entered the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole
asylum in 1889 due to mental health problems and
produced several artworks while he was staying in
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the facility. The Starry Night, 1887, one of his most
famous artworks, was inspired by a landscape
situated near the asylum.

 
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Corridor in the Asylum by Vincent van Gogh, 1889, via Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
 

A group of experts met in the year 2016 for a

symposium that was organized by the Vincent van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to discuss the
illnesses the artist could have suffered from. They
concluded that Vincent van Gogh probably had
bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder,
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alcohol use disorder, and he suffered from psychotic
episodes. Van Gogh also had a very unbalanced diet
and drank lots of alcohol which could have made his
condition worse.

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The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, via MoMA, New York

The Artist Vincent van Gogh at Saint-

Remy
One obvious way of how Van Gogh’s mental health
problems in uenced his art is the depiction of
various subjects and landscapes of Saint-Rémy. The
artist incorporated these in his work due to his stay
at the asylum. The professor of psychiatry and
behavioral science at the Johns Hopkins University
James C. Harris wrote several essays about the
connection between art and mental illness.
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According to James C. Harris, The Starry Night

could be a depiction of how Van Gogh’s condition
stabilized when he was at the asylum. Harris wrote:
“The cloudlike images in the center of the sky
assume the archetypal form of a mandala, a
symmetrical form that frequently emerges as
psychological con icts come into balance.“ (Harris,
2002). The dark cypress, though, could indicate the
approaching emergence of psychological problems,
since the cypress is a symbol of death in the area
that Van Gogh was staying at the time.

Edvard Munch
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