Vincent van Gogh

About Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh, ranked #37 for historical importance by MIT's Pantheon project, remains one of the most pivotal figures in post-Impressionist art. Though his professional career spanned only about a decade, his prolific output—including nearly 900 paintings and over 1,100 drawings—laid critical groundwork for modern art movements like Expressionism and Fauvism. His enduring legacy is defined by emotionally intense color and dynamic brushwork, exemplified in works created during his final years in Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Despite this immense historical stature, Van Gogh commands 2.6 million annualized Wikipedia pageviews in 2025, placing him in a category of "overattention" relative to his HPI rank, resulting in an Attention Gap of +3x. This indicates that modern internet users grant him significantly more attention than his overall global cultural impact suggests, potentially because his compelling personal narrative and tragic life story resonate strongly today. For comparison, Queen Victoria, ranked higher at #309, attracts 5.7M views, while the vastly more important Gautama Buddha (#2) only garners 411K views, illustrating the disconnect between historical influence and current digital focus.

Observation of the short-term data suggests a slight cooling of interest; Van Gogh's pageviews saw a year-over-year decline of -14.4%, and his Q1 vs Q3 momentum also dropped by -16%, indicating that this high level of digital attention might be subtly waning in the first half of 2025.