Biographic: Van Gogh

The Biographics series presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits, and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey each of them in vivid snapshots. The result is a quickfire journey through truths and trivia that is the most entertaining way to follow in the footsteps of the men and women whose lives have most influenced our own.

Each Biographic title is designed to be as entertaining as it is informative. Timelines not only pinpoint significant dates, but set them in the context and culture of their times. Dynamic maps locate biographical waymarks alongside other points of interest. Flow-charts and bubble-diagrams depict working processes and styles, and character traits are illuminated by visual comparisons. Biographics blend the essential with the trivial. They paint portraits by numbers, which you seem to learn with your eyes and not your brain. Packed with facts, they are the essential guides to the paths that led to greatness.

Many people know that Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was a 19th-century Dutch artist, a leading light of the Post-Impressionist movement who painted "Sunflowers" and cut off his own ear. What, perhaps, they don't know is that he sold, in his lifetime, only one of the 2,100 artworks he painted; that, in 1998, his work "Self-Portrait Without Beard" sold for $71.5 million; that he wrote over 800 letters; and that he sent that famous ear wrapped in brown paper to a brothel".Biographic: Van Gogh" presents an instant impression of his life and work, with an array of irresistible facts and figures converted into infographics to reveal the artist behind the pictures.