Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin

Agostina Segatori was an Italian-born café proprietress who ran the Café du Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy — a small Montmartre establishment that hosted a brief exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints in 1887 and subsequently showed Van Gogh's own paintings. He had a romantic relationship with Segatori, and the Café du Tambourin was, for a period in 1887, the closest thing to a gallery he had. The distinctive tambourine-shaped café tables that gave the establishment its name appear in the background of this 1887 portrait, documenting the specific milieu in which Van Gogh's Paris social and artistic life was embedded. The portrait shows him in transitional technique — the figure handled with Impressionist looseness, the background more experimental — at a moment when his relationships with Segatori, Bernard, and Signac were defining the direction of his art. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

The painting shows Van Gogh in mid-transition — the figure rendered with the looser, Impressionist-influenced brushwork he was developing, the background more experimental in its treatment of the distinctive café furniture. His palette here is more pastel and varied than his later saturated Arles work, reflecting the lighter chromatic atmosphere of Paris.