VINCENT VAN GOGH, 29th July 1890

  125 YEARS AFTER PASSING THROUGH THE DARK VALLEY OF DEPRESSION.

Vincent Van Gogh, one of the Netherlands' greatest painters, was a strange enigma, and his paintings were often a reflection of the turmoil within his life- the dark colour of the soul. He was the son of a preacher who was born in Groot-Zundert. For whatever reasons, Vincent never got along with people very well; yet he had a deep love for others and decided to follow in his father's footsteps as a minister.
He went to Brussels and enrolled in a theological seminary. In 1878 he went to a Belgium mining town and sought to convert the miners. His preaching didn't do it, so he donned the garb of a coal miner and went down into the mines, working among the men he sought to convert. But then something happened, no one knows exactly what, but the Belgium missionary society fired him for being "overly zealous".
Friendless and an outcast even to his own family, Van Gogh decided to become a painter. He studied the impresionists, but he didn't strive to be one of them. He wanted to be himself, and he painted his own way.
Some say it was because he painted in the sun; some attribute it to a poor diet; some to his own feelings of insecurity and inner turmoil - but whatever the cause, eventually his sanity gave way. All his life he considered himself to be a failure, and eventually he took his life in a mental hospital on July 29,1890.
Was he really a failure? 
People succed or fail only in respect to what they feel is their calling in life.
In 1987, his painting "Irises" sold for 50 million dollars!
Van Gogh could have been a mediocre preacher (whoever heard of his father?), but instead his heartache hepled him produce some great masterpieces. As another painter, Pierre Renoit, put it, "The pain passes; the beauty remains"( Harold Sala).

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