Van Gogh Self-Portraits

Put Van Gogh self-portraits on your phone with this candid live wallpaper!

Vincent van Gogh 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. His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.

Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. 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. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.

Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London and Paris, after which he taught for a time in England. One of his early aspirations was to become a pastor and from 1879 he worked as a missionary in a mining region in Belgium where he began to sketch people from the local community. In 1885, he painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette at the time consisted mainly of somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later work. In March 1886, he moved to Paris and discovered the French Impressionists. Later, he moved to the south of France and was impacted by the strong sunlight he found there. His work grew brighter in color, and he developed the unique and highly recognizable style that became fully realized during his stay in Arles in 1888.

The extent to which his mental health affected his painting has been a subject of speculation since his death. Despite a widespread tendency to romanticize his ill health, modern critics see an artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence brought about by his bouts of illness. According to art critic Robert Hughes, van Gogh's late works show an artist at the height of his ability, completely in control and "longing for concision and grace.”

If you’re not sure what live wallpapers are, they're a type of application that works on a mobile device using the Android operating system (like your device!). The application works as a wallpaper – providing the background image for the home screen—but also works as a conventional application since it can provide user-interaction with the touch screen (allowing the image to change dynamically, for example) and access other hardware and software features within the device (accelerometer, GPS, network access, etc.).

**Multiple backgrounds!** Switch up the background as often or as little as you like with user-configurable options.

**Power saving features!** This app uses much less power than typical live wallpapers. It will take a bit more power to operate than a normal wallpaper, but much, much less battery power than the average live wallpaper.

**Super easy to use!** Upon install the app will bring up the options menu and then immediately let you set the wallpaper. No hassle and easy to use!

**Translated to 35 languages!** Do you really, really want to learn Russian? We didn’t think so, but it’s available just in case, in any language your phone can display!

Please note that live wallpapers can’t be set automatically. We’ll bring you to the setup screen where you’ll select the live wallpaper. We’d love to do it automatically but Android doesn’t allow it. Maybe some day.

Van Gogh has not endorsed this app, but we’re confident he’s going to get back to us on that. Licensed under the creative commons (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Text at wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Wallpaper and wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Gogh.