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Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier), 1888
Van Gogh was convinced he could transform the likeness of Patience Escalier, an old gardener he met in Arles, into the image of a quintessential peasant through his use of exaggerated colour and the handling of paint. In a letter to his brother, he compared it to the way he intended to paint The Poet (3), in which a deep blue background would express ‘the infinite’. Here, he used blazing oranges and glowing gold tones to communicate ‘the very furnace of harvest time, deep in the south’.
Oil on canvas
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, California