the academy at Antwerp. While at the academy he was forced to draw from plaster casts and learn principles that did not suit him. This helped move Vincent to what was known as the Paris period.Vincent van Gogh was in Paris from March 1886 to February 1888. This was a very important period for Vincent, because it allowed him to see and hear artists discuss all the work of almost every artist there. Although Vincent admired the many members of the avant-garde, he also admired Eugene Delacroix and the painters of the Barbizion and Hague schools (Burra). While in Paris he painted many self-portraits and cityscapes. One great painting such as self-portrait with a Strew Hat (1887) hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. During these years Vincent style shifted from the darker manner characteristic of his Nuenen period to a postimpressionist style heavily influenced by pointillism. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavor of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, (Auden) he wrote, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly (Auden). Van Gogh left Paris and moved to Arles in February 1888. That year he painted Night Caf of which he said: I have tried to express with red and green the terrible passions of human nature (Sweetman, David). He also began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens and blues in some of his paintings. For a time he was influenced by Seurats delicate pointillist manner, but he abandoned this for broad, vigorous, and swirling brush- strokes. Some of his most famous paintings came from th...
