Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890) has always been one of my favorite artists. In the late 1980's, I visited New York City for the first time. I spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, at the time, there was a special exhibit of his work during his time in the psychiatric wards in Saint-Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise in France. Throughout his entire life, van Gogh suffered from severe melancholy -- I've read of diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder, and temporal lobe epilepsy. With psychiatric medicine what it was at the time, I don't know that we'll ever know from which malady he really suffered.
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