Vincent Willem van Gogh (* March 30, 1853 in Groot-Zundert; † July 29, 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise) was a Dutch painter and draftsman. He is considered one of the founders of modern painting. According to the state of knowledge in 2007, he left behind 864 paintings and over 1000 drawings, all of which were created in the last ten years of his life. Vincent van Gogh kept an extensive correspondence, which contains a wealth of references to his painterly work and is itself of literary rank.
His major work, stylistically classified as Post-Impressionism, exerted a strong influence on subsequent artists, especially the Fauves and the Expressionists. While he was able to sell only a few paintings during his lifetime, his works have been fetching record prices at auctions since the 1980s.