1 - Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive. The Red Vine was sold for 400 francs in Belgium, seven months before the painter's death. His most expensive painting was sold a century later for US$148.6 million.
2 - The Starry Night was made in an asylum in France. The painter voluntarily admitted himself to hospital to recover from the nervous breakdown that culminated in the episode of cutting off his own ear.
3 - He only started painting when he was 27, but once he started, he never stopped. In less than ten years of his career he produced almost 900 paintings. Before that, he had failed careers as an art seller, teacher and even a pastor.
4 - He loved and lived with a prostitute, Van Gogh was a man of many loves, most of them prostitutes. His favorite was a woman named Sien, with whom he lived and helped take care of the baby for some time. She appears in several portraits drawn by the painter.
5 - The colors we see in his paintings are not what he intended. Van Gogh used an unstable pigment called chrome yellow, which was prone to fading over time. The chemical change is irreversible, so we can only imagine what the pictures would look like.
Awesome. Thanks for posting this.