Famous Van Gogh Paintings: The Starry Night, Sunflowers and More

The most famous Van Gogh paintings are The Starry Night (1889), the Sunflowers (1888–89), Café Terrace at Night (1888), his self-portraits, Irises (1889), Almond Blossom (1890) and The Potato Eaters (1885). Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) painted for only about ten years, and most of the works people know were made in the last two and a half, in Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise.

This list ranks his paintings in the catalogue by fame, from the icons to the works that explain how he got there. Below is a guide to his career, his technique and his letters, and where to see his paintings today.

How Van Gogh became a painter

Van Gogh came to art late and by a winding road. Born in Zundert in the southern Netherlands, he worked for the art dealers Goupil & Cie in The Hague, London and Paris, then tried to become a preacher among the coal miners of the Borinage in Belgium. In 1880, aged 27, he decided to be an artist, supported financially by his younger brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris.

His early work is dark and earthy. In Nuenen, in Brabant, he painted weavers and peasants, culminating in The Potato Eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum), a family eating potatoes by lamplight. He wrote to Theo that he wanted to show people who had dug the earth with the same hands they were putting into the dish. The colors, he said, were those of a dusty potato, unpeeled.

Paris: color arrives (1886–1888)

In Paris, living with Theo, Van Gogh met the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists and discovered Japanese woodblock prints. His palette brightened in months. He painted more than two dozen self-portraits there, partly because he could not afford models; Self-Portrait as a Painter (1887–88, Van Gogh Museum) shows him at his easel with a palette of the pure colors he now used. Works from this period, like the worn boots of A Pair of Shoes (1886), still have the weight of his Dutch years.

Arles: the yellow years (1888–1889)

In February 1888 he moved to Arles in Provence, looking for southern light. In fifteen months he made around 200 paintings. He rented the Yellow House, hoping to found a community of artists, and painted the Sunflowers to decorate the room of his friend Paul Gauguin. There are five large surviving versions of the vase of sunflowers against a yellow ground, in London, Amsterdam, Munich, Philadelphia and Tokyo; a sixth was destroyed in Japan in 1945.

Café Terrace at Night (1888, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) was his first painting with a starry sky, painted on the spot with no black at all: blue, violet and green for the night, yellow and orange for the gaslit terrace. The Night Café, painted the same month, uses clashing reds and greens to make a room where, he wrote, one could ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime.

Gauguin arrived in October. Their partnership ended on 23 December 1888, when Van Gogh, in a mental crisis, cut off part of his left ear.

Saint-Rémy: the asylum (1889–1890)

In May 1889 he admitted himself to the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Between attacks he painted the garden, the olive groves, the cypresses and the view from his window. Irises was one of the first works there. The Starry Night (June 1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York) combines that view east toward the Alpilles hills with an invented village and a flame-like cypress, under a sky of swirling stars, a crescent moon and the morning star. Van Gogh himself was unsure of it; in a letter to the painter Émile Bernard he counted it among his failed experiments in painting from imagination.

In early 1890, news that Theo had a son, named Vincent after him, led to Almond Blossom, branches of white blossom against a blue sky in the manner of a Japanese print, painted for the baby's room.

Auvers-sur-Oise: the last seventy days (1890)

In May 1890 Van Gogh moved to Auvers, north of Paris, under the eye of Dr. Paul Gachet. He painted about seventy works in seventy days, among them the portrait of Gachet, the church at Auvers and Wheatfield with Crows. On 27 July he was wounded by a gunshot, generally believed to be self-inflicted, and he died two days later, aged 37, with Theo beside him. Wheatfield with Crows is often called his last painting; it was not, but its storm-dark sky and three paths that lead nowhere have made it the image of his end.

Illness, myth and the paintings

Van Gogh's illness has been diagnosed after the fact as epilepsy, bipolar disorder, the effects of absinthe and many other conditions; no diagnosis is certain. What the letters make clear is that he did not paint during his attacks, which left him unable to work for weeks. The paintings were made in the lucid periods between them, often with great deliberation, and he wrote about color choices and compositions with complete clarity.

That matters, because the popular image of Van Gogh as a mad genius painting in a frenzy can get in the way of the work. At Eternity's Gate (1890, Kröller-Müller Museum), an old man sitting by a fire with his face buried in his fists, is a painted copy of a lithograph he had made in The Hague in 1882. It shows grief, but it is also the work of an artist carefully revisiting his own earlier composition.

How to recognize a Van Gogh

Look at the paint. Van Gogh laid it on thickly, in visible, directional strokes, so that a sky or field seems to move. He outlined forms in dark blue, used complementary colors side by side, blue against orange, red against green, and exaggerated color for emotional effect. He also drew constantly, and his reed-pen drawings use the same rhythm of dots and dashes.

The letters

More than 800 of Van Gogh's letters survive, most of them to Theo. They are one of the great documents of an artist's life, full of descriptions of paintings in progress, color theory, books and doubts. Theo died six months after Vincent, and it was Theo's widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who published the letters in 1914 and built her brother-in-law's reputation. See The Letters of Vincent van Gogh.

Where to see Van Gogh's paintings

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam holds the largest collection, about 200 paintings, much of it from the family. The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo has the second largest. The Starry Night is at MoMA in New York, Irises at the Getty in Los Angeles, The Night Café at Yale University Art Gallery, and versions of the Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.