La Mousmé

La Mousmé was painted in Arles in July 1888 following Van Gogh's intensive reading of Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème, a novel set in Japan that had been enormously popular in France since its publication in 1887. Loti's term 'mousmé' for a young Japanese woman became Van Gogh's framework for this portrait of a young Provençal sitter — probably in her early teens — whom he transformed through a Japanese-inflected vision of southern clarity and decorative simplicity. He wrote to Theo that he had worked on it for a full week, which was unusually long for him, and that it had cost more effort than almost anything else he had made. The painting belongs to a specific moment in his theorisation of Japanese influence: not just formal borrowing but conceptual assimilation — the attempt to see through Japanese eyes while painting a southern French girl. The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC holds this as one of his most considered Arles portraits.

The striped blouse is executed in interlocking areas of flat colour with minimal tonal modelling — a deliberately Japanese approach to pattern. The green background provides cool contrast to the warm flesh tones. The oleander flowers the sitter holds are accented in rapid, gestural marks.