Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderArt fact

Vincent van Gogh made almost all of his roughly 2,100 artworks, including about 860 oil paintings, in the last ten years of his life.

Van Gogh Museum

Art

The story behind the card

Van Gogh decided to become an artist in 1880, at 27, after unsuccessful spells as an art dealer, a teacher and a preacher, and he died in 1890 at 37. His brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, supported him with money throughout. The pace rose towards the end: in his last 70 days, at Auvers-sur-Oise, he painted around 70 canvases. He sold very few works in his lifetime. Fame came after his death, largely through Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who organised exhibitions and in 1914 published his letters to Theo, which showed readers the thoughtful man behind the paintings.

Türkçe oku
Vincent van Gogh, 860 kadarı yağlı boya olmak üzere yaklaşık 2.100 eserinin neredeyse tamamını hayatının son on yılında yaptı.

Van Gogh ressam olmaya 1880'de, 27 yaşında karar verdi. Öncesinde sanat taciri, öğretmen ve vaiz olarak denediği işlerin hiçbirinde tutunamamıştı; 1890'da 37 yaşında öldü. Paris'te sanat taciri olan kardeşi Theo, bu yıllar boyunca ona para yardımı yaptı. Hayatının sonuna doğru hızı daha da arttı: Auvers-sur-Oise'daki son 70 gününde 70 kadar tablo yaptı. Yaşarken çok az eser satabildi. Ün ölümünden sonra geldi; bunda en büyük pay, Theo'nun dul eşi Johanna van Gogh-Bonger'indir. Johanna sergiler düzenledi ve 1914'te Vincent'ın Theo'ya yazdığı mektupları yayımladı. Mektuplar, tabloların ardındaki düşünceli insanı okurlara tanıttı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Vincent van Gogh
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

The Protestant Reformation spread fast partly thanks to printing. From 1517 onwards Martin Luther's writings came off the presses as short, cheap pamphlets, many of them in German rather than Latin; in the first third of the 16th century, about one in five works printed in Germany was his.

The Reformation was the 16th-century movement that split Western Christianity and created Protestant churches independent of Rome. It is usually dated from 31 October 1517, when Luther, a monk and university teacher in Wittenberg, circulated his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences, certificates the Church sold to reduce the punishment for sins. A century earlier the Czech reformer Jan Hus had made similar criticisms and was executed in 1415; the historian Lyndal Roper argues that print is the main reason Luther escaped the same fate. Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type printing, developed in the mid-15th century, made short pamphlets cheap, and presses were scattered across many German towns, so no single authority could stop them. Towns with a printing press were more likely to adopt the Reformation. As most people could not read, Luther's friend the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcut pictures that put his ideas into images.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

In a cave in Jujuy, northern Argentina, archaeologists found two pipes carved from puma bone, with seeds of cebil, a tree whose seeds are psychoactive, lying beside them. Chemical traces inside the pipes point to plant smoking more than 4,000 years ago, among the oldest evidence of such use in South America.

Cebil, Anadenanthera colubrina, is a South American tree whose seeds contain tryptamines, compounds that strongly alter perception; further north in the Andes it is called vilca. The pipes come from Inca Cueva 7, a small rock shelter near the Humahuaca valley at the edge of the high Andean plateau, where seeds of cebil and of mesquite lay in the same layer. Radiocarbon measurements, which gauge how much of the carbon-14 in once-living material has decayed, give ages of about 4,000 years, roughly 2100 BC. The residue shows that a tryptamine-bearing plant was smoked, but it cannot prove exactly which one. Cebil use continued in the region for thousands of years: Wichí healers in northern Argentina still used its seeds, which they call hatáj, in the 1990s.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

About 155,000 species of fungi have been formally described, yet the true number is estimated at 2.2 to 3.8 million. That means more than nine in ten fungal species have never been named.

That range comes from a 2017 review by two fungus specialists, David Hawksworth and Robert Lücking. They combined several lines of evidence: how fast new species are still being described, how often one familiar-looking species turns out to be several once its DNA is checked, and the ratio of fungi to plants at well-studied sites. A 2023 study put the likeliest total at about 2.5 million. Most fungi never form mushrooms. They live as microscopic yeasts or as networks of fine threads called hyphae, in soil, inside plants, in lichens and in water, and many are known only from DNA found in soil or water samples. Around 2,500 new species are named each year; at that pace, scientists at Kew Gardens in London estimate, naming them all would take 750 to 1,000 years.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveHand stencils are among the oldest art we know: people pressed a palm to a cave wall and blew pigment around it. One on Muna Island in Indonesia has been dated to at least 67,800 years ago.Read next →