The Night Café

Vincent Willem van Gogh ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890 was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty, and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted. His work was then known to only a handful of people and... appreciated by fewer still. Van Gogh loved art from an early age. He began to draw as a child, and he continued making drawings throughout the years leading to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during his last two years. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.
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The Yale University Art Gallery houses a significant and encyclopedic collection of art in several buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Although it embraces all cultures and periods, the Gallery possesses especially renowned collections of early Italian painting, African sculpture, and modern art. Its holdings of American decorative and fine arts are amongst the best in existence. The Yale University Art Gallery... is the oldest university art museum in the western hemisphere. The Gallery was founded in 1832, when patriot-artist John Trumbull donated to Yale College more than 100 paintings of the American Revolution and designed the original Picture Gallery. This building, on Old Campus, was razed in 1901. The Gallery's main building was built in 1953 and was among the very first designed by Louis Kahn, who taught architecture at Yale. A complete renovation, which returned many spaces to Kahn's original vision, was completed in December 2006 by Polshek Partnership Architects. The older Tuscan romanesque portion was built in 1928 and was designed by Egerton Swartwout. A 10-year renovation project is due to be complete in 2011.
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