7 Artists Like Van Gogh You Should Know About

Start with the friend. Gauguin painted Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers in Arles in 1888. ^[1] Tate places the two among the four major Post-Impressionists, along with Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat, painters who each took Impressionism in a different direction. ^[2]

Gauguin kept Impressionism's intense light and color, says Tate. ^[2] What split the friends was method: the Van Gogh Museum notes that Gauguin preferred to work from imagination, while Van Gogh painted directly from nature, and the two often debated it. ^[1] Our guide to Gauguin's portrait of Van Gogh looks closely at the painting above.

They also traded portraits. Van Gogh knew that Japanese printmakers often swapped their work, liked the idea and suggested that Gauguin and Émile Bernard do the same. ^[11] Both friends answered with self-portraits that included the other's likeness in the background. ^[11] Van Gogh's own side of the friendship is Gauguin's Armchair, and you can follow their months in Arles too.

If Van Gogh moves you, Munch probably will too. The Munch Museum in Oslo says both made art with strong emotional content in a personal, innovative style, both lived troubled lives, and the public and art historians have often compared them. ^[3] Its 2015 exhibition with the Van Gogh Museum named the shared tools: a vibrant palette, a highly stylized idiom, personal and bold brushwork and unconventional compositions. ^[3]

Paris was a turning point for both, and both built series in which pictures formed a larger whole: Munch's Frieze of Life and Van Gogh's Décoration. ^[3] The museum chose The Sick Child and The Scream to show the kinship, next to Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhône and Wheatfield with Reaper. ^[3] Our comparison of the two starry nights is a good next step.

The best Matisse story involves a bicycle. In 1899, as a struggling 29-year-old, he fell in love with Van Gogh's L'Arlésienne at Ambroise Vollard's gallery in Paris, priced at 150 francs. ^[5] He asked his brother Auguste to help, but Auguste had just bought a bicycle, and by the time Matisse raised the money the dealer wanted 450. ^[5]

The admiration ran deep. He already owned a Van Gogh drawing, a gift in 1897 from the Australian painter John Russell, who had befriended Van Gogh in Paris. ^[5] In 1898 he painted his own Sunflowers, a very personal image in a looser, more Expressionist style than the Dutchman's. ^[5] After the first Van Gogh retrospective, at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1901, he became one of the Fauves. ^[5] Tate dates Fauvism to about 1905 to 1910 and says it “can be seen as an extreme extension of the post-impressionism of Van Gogh combined with the neo-impressionism of Seurat.” ^[4] Late in life Matisse still kept a reproduction of Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear in his bedroom. ^[5]

Derain met Matisse at that same 1901 retrospective, along with Maurice de Vlaminck, and The Art Newspaper describes both as equally entranced by Van Gogh's expressive use of color. ^[5] In 1905 the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw work by Matisse and Derain at the Salon d'Automne in Paris and called them les fauves, the wild beasts. ^[4]

The pictures they showed in 1905 came from a summer working together in Collioure, in the south of France, with bold, non-naturalistic colors often squeezed straight from the tube and wild, loose dabs of paint. ^[4] That is Van Gogh's color pushed one step further. Put his Red Vineyards at Arles beside Derain's hills and the family resemblance is clear. Our pages on Post-Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism trace the two sources Tate names.

In Germany the same spark became Expressionism. Tate says the German Expressionists took their cues from the dramatic post-impressionist paintings of Van Gogh and Munch, among others, and set out to move beyond literal depictions of nature. ^[6] Tate names two groups, The Bridge (Die Brücke) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), and among their artists Kirchner, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Franz Marc. ^[6]

Their goal will sound familiar: to put emotion and spirituality back into art. ^[6] The Neue Galerie in New York built a whole exhibition on the link in 2007, with the Van Gogh Museum, and showed major Van Gogh canvases together with works by Kirchner and others. ^[10] Kirchner's street scene below, with its flat, loud color, shares the unnatural palette of Van Gogh's Night Café. To see what that emotion meant in Van Gogh's own words, read what Van Gogh's paintings mean.

For Kandinsky, says the Neue Galerie, Van Gogh represented the way forward to abstraction. ^[10] Tate lists Kandinsky among the German Expressionists, who set out to move beyond literal depictions of nature. ^[6] Look at the swirling brushwork of Van Gogh's Starry Night and you can see why a painter who wanted color and line to carry feeling would pay attention.

Across the border in Austria, the Neue Galerie says Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka were especially impressed by the soulful expression of Van Gogh's art and his insightful psychological portraits. ^[12] The 2007 exhibition included important paintings by Schiele along with major Van Gogh canvases. ^[10] If you like the intensity of a Van Gogh face, Schiele's self-portraits are the place to go next, and our page on Van Gogh's self-portraits is the best place to compare.

Three things keep coming back in these museum sources: color used for feeling rather than accuracy, brushwork you can see, and a deep bond with nature. Tate sums up Van Gogh himself this way: he painted from nature but developed a highly personal use of color and brushwork to express his emotional response and his inner world. ^[2] Each artist on this list took one of those threads and pulled it somewhere new.

The thread runs on today, though living painters' work is not shown here. In 2019 the Van Gogh Museum paired David Hockney with Van Gogh in The Joy of Nature, and the museum notes that for both of them spring and nature are important subjects. ^[7] Anselm Kiefer won a travel scholarship in 1963 and chose to follow Van Gogh's route through the Netherlands, Belgium and France; the museum calls Van Gogh a vital source of inspiration for him. ^[8] If you love Van Gogh's orchards and fields, browse Van Gogh's landscapes, and meet Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, one of several Van Gogh sunflower paintings, in our guide to the Sunflowers versions.