Van Gogh spent his early life working for a firm of art dealers, and after a brief spell as a teacher, became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880, at the age of 27. Initially he worked in sombre colours, until an encounter in Paris with Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism accelerated his artistic development. He produced all of his more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1100 drawings or sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, and in the two months before his death he painted 90 pictures.
Van Gogh is today one of the most  popular of the Post-Impressionist 
painters, although he was not widely appreciated during his lifetime.

He is now famed for the great vitality of his works which are characterised 
by expressive and emotive use of brilliant colour and energetic application 
of impastoed paint.

The traumas of his life, documented in his letters, have tended to dominate 
and distort modern perceptions of his art.

Van Gogh's Chair
Vincent van GOGH
1888

Long Grass with Butterflies, Vincent van GOGH, 1890

Sunflowers
Vincent van GOGH
1888

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, Vincent van GOGH, 1889

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses

Van GOGH
1889

Canvas, 72.1 x 90.9 cm 
Purchased by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund, 
1923; returned from the Tate Gallery, 1961.

Painted in the summer of 
1889, when Van Gogh was 
in the St-Rémy asylum and 
fields of corn with or without cypresses were the subject of 
a number of pictures.

An almost identical version of 
the painting is in the Bührle collection, Zurich.

Long Grass with Butterflies

VAN GOGH
1890

Canvas, 64.5 x 80.7 cm Purchased by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund, 1926.

This work was painted in May 1890 at the end of van Gogh’s 
stay in the asylum at St-Rémy. 
It shows part of a spring meadow bursting with new vegetation 
and speckled with butterflies.

The horizon is not shown, 
but the meadow is contained at the top by the tree-lined road. 

At this time van Gogh’s canvases are mostly of the asylum park, almond trees and flowers