An Old Woman of Arles

An Old Woman of Arles, painted in 1888, reflects Van Gogh's sustained interest in the faces of the local Arlesian population during his productive year in Provence. He arrived in February 1888 hoping to find in the southern French landscape and people the clarity of light, the simplicity of form, and the frankness of colour that he associated with Japanese woodblock prints. The women of Arles, with their distinctive physiognomies and traditional dress, seemed to him subjects worthy of the same respect he had given the peasant women of Nuenen. As an Arles portrait, this canvas belongs alongside his portraits of the Roulin family in a body of work that sought to document the social world of the city with affectionate particularity. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Van Gogh's brushwork is intensely physical — thick impasto applied in directional strokes that model the face with an energy that transforms careful observation into expressive force. His palette in the Arles portraits is intensified by the Mediterranean light — warmer, more saturated than his Paris work — with complementary colour pairings used to convey both the physical reality of his subject and its emotional resonance.