MyReadingMapped™: Interactive Map of the Life and Art Vincent van Gogh

Self portrait, 1889.
Wikipedia Commons

This documentary, in the form of an interactive Google Map, enables you to follow the life and art of the Dutch post-Impressionist painter Vincent Willem van Gogh. With this map you can zoom-in on the actual houses, inns, workplaces, boarding houses, and painting locations that influenced van Gogh. And, I even managed to match up many of his paintings with either the actual location portrayed in the painting, or the city or town that inspired the painting; and a few of his letters to his brother Theo, and his friend E. Bernard. Thus, you can get a good idea of who Vincent was. Most of the painting locations represent the location of the subject matter painted, while others, as noted, represent an approximation of the easel location the subject matter was viewed from by the painter.

Click here to speed up viewing this map, it will take you to the original Google Map, complete with legend.

Through van Gogh's letters, I found it interesting that he was equally expressive in his in writing, and could have made a decent living working for a newspaper. His ability to combine expressive writing and detailed pictures made him an effective communicator. Read his letters describing his paintings to see what I mean. In his letters he effectively combined sketches and words. Don't let the appearance of the map fool you, there are a lot of location markers that are so close they overlap each other when zoomed-out. The push pins symbols represent locations Vincent visited, the pallet symbols represent art he created, and the envelope symbols represent the excerpts from the letters he wrote. If you zoom all the way down to ground level on the road for location #26, it will switch to Google Street view, where you can walk the last scene Vincent van Gogh ever painted, and see his tomb as well.

The locations were determined from the following: