How Van Gogh: influenced--and was influenced by--the art of drawing: while Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Daumier had a great impact on him, others, such as Matisse and Klee, were early beneficiaries of his example.

• Position: Museums Today

VINCENT VAN GOGH cultivated a large appetite for pictures and developed a very broad knowledge of art. While working as a young art dealer in The Hague, Paris, and London between 1869-76, as well as in Amsterdam, where he was training to be a preacher between 1877-78, Van Gogh took every opportunity he could to visit museums and galleries and acquaint himself with the works of old masters and his contemporaries. Many of these artists particularly Rembrandt van Rijn, Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Francois Millet, Honore Daumier, and the Japanese masters of ukiyo-e had a resounding impact on his choice of subject matter and the evolution of his extraordinary drawing style while others, like Henri Matisse and Paul Klee, were early beneficiaries of his example.

Van Gogh greatly admired Rembrandt and repeatedly turned to the work of the 17th-century master whom he called the "magician of magicians" and the "great and universal master portrait painter of the Dutch Republic." Rembrandt's drypoints and etchings no doubt were an influence on Van Gogh's expressive freedom with the reed pen, as well as on his choice of subject matter. His experience of the French countryside was informed by his memory of the works of Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and other 17th-century Dutch landscapists.

Van Gogh also closely studied the work of French painters. The realist Millet was a great source of inspiration. Both at the beginning and end of his career, Van Gogh made numerous copies and variants of Millet's compositions, inspired by their realism and respect for rural life. In the works of the 19th-century French landscape painter Theodore Rousseau, he recognized a sincere appreciation of nature and their kinship with the work of van Ruisdael. Delacroix's art inspired and consoled Van Gogh throughout his life and he was particularly responsive to Delacroix's rejection of the academic approach in favor of expressive line. While he was working to improve his command of figure drawing, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo of his admiration for Daumier.

Like many of his contemporaries, Van Gogh was fascinated with the pictorial novelty of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which flooded Europe after trade routes were reopened in the 1850s. He collected them avidly and tacked them up on the walls of his studio in Antwerp. In Paris, as the collection of prints he and his brother amassed grew into the hundreds, Van Gogh organized an exhibition of them at the Cafe Ee Tambourin and...