Data visualizations about the life on Vincent van Gogh
The goal of the life in color project was to provide with new perspectives on the life of Vincent van Gogh, by supporting art history with data science. More particularly, his seasonal, yearly, geographical and color patterns were analyzed and visualized.
The website does not highlight strong conclusions about the analysis, as I encourage people to interpret the visualizations freely.
When starting this project, I expected to find different colors towards the end of Vincent's life, while he became mentally ill.
From the visualizations it becomes clear that the colors he used actually became brighter.
Therefore, I conclude that his surroundings, i.e. the places from where he painted, were of great influence.
This was to be expected, as Vincent van Gogh is an impressionist who paints directly what he sees.
With respect to the seasonality of his work, no clear conclusions can be drawn. This partly due to the lacking information about his time in Paris.
For some years, he did paint more in specific seasons, e.g. summer. From the historical knowledge about Vincent van Gogh,
it seems more logical that the seasonality was rather coincidental - a matter of whether he had the ability to paint.
Moreover, he switched places a lot. Therefore, he painted sometimes painted winters in place A, and summers in place B.
Lastly, regarding his yearly productivity, there was an overall increase that started to decline as he became ill.
Statistical data about Vincent van Gogh's paintings and retrieving the colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Vincent_van_Gogh
Historical data about Vincent's life: https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en
Quotes from Vincent van Gogh: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/vincent-van-gogh-quotes and https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/34583.Vincent_van_Gogh
- Webscraping applied in Python
- Data cleaning and season and color calculations in Python
- Website built and hosted in HTML, styled with CSS and animated with Javascript
- Map drawn with geojson and d3, later redesigned in Adobe Illustrator
Author: Wies Ruyters
Contact: wiesruyters@gmail.com