View from Theo's Apartment by Vincent Van Gogh Table Number

View from Theo's Apartment by Vincent Van Gogh, oil on canvas 1887, is a landscape painting looking across the rooftops of urban Paris on a sunny day, where Theo the brother of the artist was an art dealer specializing in modern, Impressionist paintings. Van Gogh builds the picture in thinly applied, small dots and dabs of oil colors, juxtaposing similar and contrasting colors to create a richly colored effect of light and atmosphere. In Paris the artist absorbed the lessons of the Impressionist painters as well as of his fellow artists Signac and Seurat, whose pictorial construction in small dots of contrasting colors was called pointillism, divisionism, or Neo-Impressionism. This view of shuttered apartment buildings and rooftops looking into the distant haze of Paris displays the new sense of color, form and composition that Van Gogh learned during his Paris period. Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890) was a Dutch painter of the Post-Impressionist movement known for bold, expressive drawing, swirling brushstrokes and intense, heightened colors. In early adulthood Van Gogh worked as an art dealer, teacher and pastor before taking up the full time study of drawing and painting in his late twenties. Influenced by Rembrandt, the 19th century Realists and Barbizon school, Van Gogh's early paintings featured studies of workers and peasants in somber earth tones. Moving to France in 1886, Van Gogh met with the startling innovations of the Impressionist painters and began to apply their approach to color and subject matter, which continued into the mature style for which the artist is most renowned. Van Gogh produced many hundreds of drawings and paintings including portraits, landscapes, still life and flower paintings, and numerous self-portraits that became a dominating influence on the modern art of the 20th century and made him one of the most popular artists of all time.