In 1881 at the age of 28, van Gogh determined to become an artist, and from then on he worked at painting with an almost single-minded frenzy. In the last ten years of his life he was prolific, leaving over 800 paintings and about 850 drawings. In 1886, upon moving to Paris to be near his brother Theo, an art dealer, van Gogh became familiar with the Impressionist works and theories, and met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec.
Moving to the Midi in 1888, van Gogh settled in Arles and developed his own style, influenced in part by Impressionist and Pointillist theories, as well as Japanese woodcut art styles. He became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them, not merely to reproduce scenes, but as a means of expression. It has been said that in the history of painting, van Gogh's greatest contribution is his formative influence of abstractly using color and form for their intrinsic symbolic and expressive values.
