A Fire in His Soul: Van Gogh, Paris, and the Making of an Artist

The fascinating story of Vincent van Gogh’s two groundbreaking years in Paris, where he transformed himself from a provincial unknown into one of the world’s great visionary artists.Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent's crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish. Theo, a successful art dealer at a prestigious Parisian firm, dismissed them as gloomy, unappealing, and, worst of all, unmarketable.By the time Vincent left Paris, almost exactly two years later, he’d transformed himself into one of the most original artists of the age, turning out works of hallucinatory inten