Vincent van Gogh was a driven and motivated individual who gleaned the best that he could extract from the unfathomable depth of his soul. He was the epitome of a genius whose obsession with Nature seemed to classify him in the category of eccentrics, a man whose dire circumstances served to embolden him all the more, in the pursuit of his freedom and spontaneity, to paint in bold and dazzling colors. He painted bright sunflowers, expanses of wheat fields and skies of blue, crimson and yellow. His obsession with night was such that he even considered it to be much more alive and brilliantly colored than day. He painted night scenes that interested him enormously. His night and daylight paintings are equally expressive and reflective of the quality and enormity of his unbridaled genius.

His 1888 Sunflowers is considered as the most popular still life in the history of art. His landscape, The Starry Night, ranks as the most popular painting at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). This inspired the museum to mount the exhibition, “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night” (through January 5, 2009), after which it is scheduled to be exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum February 13-June 7, 2009). Vincent van Gogh’s periodic fits of depression and anguish did not take away his exuberance and consciousness of his achievements. Critics called him a chromomaniac. He rendered on canvas what he saw almost as quickly as he saw it. It was said that he was also literary-minded. He was particularly enamoured of Walt Whitman’s poems which served to accelerate his passion to paint Nature with all its beauty, until he suddenly lost control of his life. He began hallucinating and in his fit of anguish, severed part of his ear and delivered it to a prostitute at a local brothel. Since then, his hallucinations increased, and he spent most of the last two years of his life in asylums. But he never stopped painting. He continued to paint whatever he could see through the bars of his window or the surrounding gardens and fields. His last painting called Wheatfield with Crows was regarded as a work of genius, unrivalled. After painting it, his condition continued to deteriorate, until he shot himself and died two days later. He was buried in a graveyard next to the field.