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for Vincent offering him better art supplies and access to art collections in the great museums and galleries. Japanese art was coming into Europe and he began to collect Japanese woodblock prints.

In 1885 Vincent van Gogh had only five years of life left to him.

In 1886 Paris was the most exciting city in the world of art, where artists gathered and exchanged ideas: Manet, Degas, Cezanne, the pointillists, Japanese art - for this was the European center of everything new. Theo van Gogh was in the art world managing the Montmartre branch of Goupil. Vincent was thirty-two years old when he joined his younger brother in Paris and it was through Theo that he was able to meet other artists including the Impressionists who were causing a stir. Vincent began to come to life in Paris; his great creative gift was first liberated there and his palette freed from the earth tones that had dominated his work in Holland. It was then that he realized the power of pure color and the symbolism of color to express his emotions.

By 1888 Vincent was causing distress to his brother Theo, who loyally continued to support and encourage him. He had completed 200 paintings while in Paris but was drinking heavily and suffering nervous attacks. Theo wrote: "It is as if he had two persons in him - one marvelously gifted, delicate and tender; the other egotistical and hard-hearted". Vincent seemed to realize that complete breakdown was looming for him and that he needed to leave the stimulation of Paris. In 1888 he left for the south of France and its sun and brightness; he went to Arles.

In 1888 Vincent van Gogh had only 2 years of life left to him.

Arles enchanted Vincent and he produced a colossal amount of work there at breakneck speed; in Arles his art achieved a peak in an explosion of vivid color. His output was staggering: between his arrival in Arles in February and his mental collapse in December he did at least 90 drawings and 100 paintings including Sunflowers, Starry Night on the Rhone and others that are now world celebrated. His health remained precarious and Theo was anxious about the way he was driving himself. The artist Gauguin stayed with Vincent in the yellow house he had rented in Arles, but their "incompatibility of temperament" meant that he had to leave. At one point Vincent had physically attacked Gauguin and had later [famously] cut off the lobe of one ear which he then wrapped and gave to a prostitute. He was placed in a hospital where his breakdown

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