NARRATOR:
In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh announced the imminent arrival of this portrait at Theo’s Paris gallery:
VAN GOGH (ACTOR):
“You will shortly be making the acquaintance of Monsieur Patience Escalier, a kind of ‘man with a hoe,’ a former cowherd from the Camargue, and now a gardener at a house in Crau.”
NARRATOR:
The gnarled old peasant possesses a great dignity that vividly expresses van Gogh’s ideas about portraiture.
VAN GOGH (ACTOR):
“Portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think should come.”
NARRATOR:
Van Gogh created this powerful image in August 1888, while he was in Arles, in the south of France. There, he found simple, spiritually pure people and a clarity of light that were lacking in Paris.
VAN GOGH (ACTOR):
“The south makes poverty less harsh and melancholy. I painted the impression of the sunnyness, of being burned, scorched by the hot sun and open air.”
NARRATOR:
He wrote about a similar portrait:
VAN GOGH (ACTOR):
“Behind the head, instead of the shabby lodgings, I paint infinity, a simple background of the richest, the most intense blue I can contrive.”
NARRATOR:
Unlike the Impressionists who used color to translate atmospheric effects, van Gogh used his palette to convey an emotional impact. He repeated the yellows in Monsieur Escalier’s hat in sections of his face. And the turquoise of his jacket is echoed in his eyes, cheek, lower lip, and facial hair.
Van Gogh had begun painting peasants about three earlier, in his native Netherlands. He viewed painting the poor as a spiritual activity, and consciously chose to live as an impoverished painter, among peasants. His description of this portrait as a “man with a hoe” refers to the title of a painting by Jean Millet. Like this older contemporary, van Gogh was drawn to these subjects for their honesty, humility and spiritual resonance.
Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier)
August 1888
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
On View
Sunburnt and weather-beaten, the Provençal peasant Patience Escalier gazes out of Van Gogh’s picture with blazing intensity. Dazzling yellow, vivid blue, green, and red make this portrait, painted in August 1888, perhaps the artist’s most daring coloristic experiment to date. “[I]nstead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, “I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself with force.” He called the picture “a sort of ‘man with a hoe,’” referring to a celebrated work by the previous generation’s great painter of peasants, Jean-François Millet: Man with a Hoe, today in the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Details
- Artist Name: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)
- Title: Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier)
- Date: August 1888
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 25-1/4 x 21-1/2 in. (64.1 x 54.6 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation
- Accession Number: M.1975.06.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
Mrs. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam, sold Dec. 1899 to;
Henricus Petrus Bremmer (1871-1956), The Hague, still in 1935, to;
Mr. and Mrs. Edouard L. Jonas, Paris and New York;
Mrs. H. Harris Jonas (Mrs. Edouard Jonas, 1884–1974), New York, to;
[Wildenstein and Co., New York, sold 1975 to];
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
Henricus Petrus Bremmer (1871-1956), The Hague, still in 1935, to;
Mr. and Mrs. Edouard L. Jonas, Paris and New York;
Mrs. H. Harris Jonas (Mrs. Edouard Jonas, 1884–1974), New York, to;
[Wildenstein and Co., New York, sold 1975 to];
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
[on loan]
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- Emily Beeny, Stéphane Guégan, Pas de deux: An Exchange of Masterpieces,2015, pp. 2, 20, 55
- The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh,nos. 519, 520, 522, 528, 529, 534
- Museums Los Angeles, p. 38
- Rudine, W., Follies, p. 2
- Shackelford, G., Vincent van Gogh: The Painter and the Portrait,fig. 37 pp. 43, 45, 47
- Steadman, David W., The Connoisseur,pl. B p. 223
- Faille, J. B. de la, The Works of Vincent van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings,F.443 pp. 204, 628
- Feilchenfeldt, Walter, Vincent van Gogh & Paul Cassirer, Berlin: The Reception of van Gogh in Germany from 1901-1914,no. F 443 p. 95
- Hulsker, Jan, The Complete van Gogh: Paintings, Drawings, Sketches,no. 1548 p. 355
- Jirat-Wasiutynski, Vojtech, Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity,fig. 11.2 177-191
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- Marlowe, J., San Francisco, pp. 120-121
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