"'I believe in the absolute necessity of a new art of colour, of drawing and--of the artistic life,' Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in 1888. 'And if we work in that faith, it seems to me that there's a chance that our hopes won't be in vain. 'His prediction would come true. In his brief and explosively creative life--he committed suicide a few years later at the age of thirty-seven--Van Gogh made us see the world in a new way. His shining landscapes of Provence and somber portraits of workers shattered the relationship between light and dark, and his hallucinatory visions were so bright they nearly blinded the world,"--Amazon.com.