Van Gogh's 'Portrait of a Peasant' from the Norton Simon, An Introduction to the Exhibition
– I'm Susan Galassi, Senior Curator at The Frick Collection.
And I'd like to introduce you to a special loan, Vincent Van Gogh's Portrait of a
Peasant from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which is on view in the Oval Room.Everything in this painting contributes to it's expressive power.
The sitter faces us directly, head and shoulders frontal and pushed up to the surface.
Coors are strong, primaries and secondaries, and the outlines, bold.
The lively hand of the artist moving his brush through thick paint creates a textured effect on the surface of the painting, giving the subject's weathered face a rough hewn effect.
His eyes painted in brilliant colors underlie the impact of his gaze.
The Portrait of a Peasant was painted in Arles, in the south of France, where Van Gogh spent 15 months between February 1888 and May 1889.
A period of intenseproductivity and innovation.
Vincent Van Gogh wasborn in Holland in 1853, the son of a clergyman.
His early work such asthis Head of a Peasant, and his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, show a sympathy for the plight of rural workers, whose lives he wanted to dignify through portraiture.
The earthy tones andspirituality of these works, reflect his profound love for Rembrandt and other 17th century Dutch Masters, as well as the 19thcentury French Realist, Jean Francois Millet.
Emulating Millet, whose famous, Man with a Hoe he admired, Van Gogh described himself as a peasant painter.
In 1886, Vincent moved to Paris, where his brother andclosest confidant, Theo, was an art dealer.
In the French capital, he met members of the Impressionist andPost Impressionist groups, and responded to their bright palettes, and their methods of painting in short colorful strokes, as we see in this work by George Seurat.
Such paintings inspired Van Gogh's own change of palette and technique during his two years in Paris.
Living in the metropolis proved difficult for the artist, however, and he sought a simpler life where he could live more cheaply and closer to the earth.
In February of 1888, heleft for Arles in Provence.
In the late 19th century, Arles was known for its Roman ruins, folk festivals, bull fighting and it's strong senseof regional identity, as seen in the preservationof customs of dress, as well as dialect andit's literary tradition.
Van Gogh responded tohis new environment's clear light and vivid colors, capturing its distinctive landscape and the changing seasons in his paintings.
Informed by color theory and the Japanese prints he collected, as well as by his friend Gauguin's exploration of the relationshipof color and emotion.
Vincent intensified his palette, exaggerating the colors of nature, in an effort to get atsomething beyond the visible; the essence of the South and it's culture.
While he painted some of his most beautiful landscapes in Arles as well as images of the town, his deeper interest lay in the figure.
His figurative work in Arles was nothing less than a reinvigoration of the genre of portraiture, resulting in a series of different types of people of the city.
For example, a Zouavesoldier stationed there, a postman, a poet, and of course, a peasant.
In his frequent letters to his brother, Vincent wrote about hiscommitment to portraiture, quote, “The change that I'm going “to try to make in my paintings, “will be to do more figures.
“In short, it's the only thing in painting “that moves me deeply, “and that gives me a sense of the infinite “more than the rest.
” In another letter, heidentified his sitter as Patience Escalier, a gardener and formeroxherd from the Camargue.
A romantic figure akinto the American cowboy.
Like his earlier sitters in Holland, Patience appealed to Van Gogh as a man of the earth, a defining characteristic he sought to express in this portrait, though now, with radicalnew means of expression.
After completing the painting, he immediately made a drawing after it and sent it to his brother, translating the graphicenergy of his brushwork to the dots and dashes of his pen.
And he would paint a second version a few weeks later.
While the work exudes a sense of vitalty and spontaneity, it was made in several sessions with careful planning and execution.
Vincent reflected onthe steps he was making in his frequent letters to his brother.
His goal in his portraits he wrote, was to capture the essenceof a sitter through color.
As he put it, quote, “Insteadof trying to render exactly “what I had before my eyes, “I use color more arbitrarily “in order to express myself forcefully.
” For his portrait of the peasant, color linked the man back to the earth that he worked, and that shaped his appearance.
A budding large areas of primary and secondary colors create vibrations where they meet, while the face is a concentration of energetic lines, dashesand touches of paint.
Note the turquoise andred brought into the eyes, and the cool green of the jacket repeated in the beard, examples of his conceptof arbitrary color.
Through analogy, he fuses the man and his environment into a whole.
The yellow of his round-domed hat is a surrogate for the sun.
The contrasting blue whichincreases it's brilliance, suggests the azure of the midday sky.
Vincent described the sitter to Theo as the terrific man whom he painted in the very furnace of harvest time deep in the South.
Hence, the orangesblazing like red-hot iron, hence the old gold tones glowing in the darkness.
Words which reveal the almost mythical power he ascribed to his subject and captured through the power of color and the bold sureness of his brushwork.
Vincent Van Gogh's Portrait of a Peasant, Patience Escalier, will remain on view at the Frick Collectionuntil January 20th, 2013.
(light music).
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