Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was 27. Before that, he’d failed as an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, and a minister. He spent time living among coal miners, giving away his clothes and sleeping on straw. When he finally picked up a brush, he had roughly a decade left to live. In those ten years, he created over 2,100 artworks — including Starry Night, painted from the window of an asylum where he’d committed himself after cutting off part of his ear. He sold exactly one painting while alive. His brother Theo was his lifeline, funding his work and receiving the hundreds of letters that would later reveal Vincent’s extraordinary mind. On July 27, 1890, he walked into a wheat field near Auvers-sur-Oise and shot himself. He died two days later, at 37, with Theo at his side. Today his paintings sell for tens of millions. The world caught up, about a century too late.