Close-ups of Van Gogh’s masterpieces (25 pictures)

The Google Art Project is a collaboration with museums large and small, classic and modern, world-renowned and community-based from over 40 countries. Together they have contributed more than 40,000 high-resolution images of works ranging from oil on canvas to sculpture and furniture. Some paintings (like The Starry Night) are available in ‘gigapixel’ format, allowing you to zoom in at brushstroke level to examine and appreciate the incredible detail of these masterpieces.

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 aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. 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.