The Smoker

The Smoker at the Barnes Foundation connects two important strands of Van Gogh's portraiture: his early Nuenen interest in pipe-smoking working men and his Arles period development of that interest with a fully developed chromatic technique. He had painted men with pipes at Nuenen as part of his sustained documentation of peasant life, finding in the pipe — its bowl, its smoke, the specific posture of a man drawing on it — both a compositional element and a social marker of male working-class relaxation. The Arles version brings the same subject into the south with a fully evolved palette and technique: the warm face against a simplified background, the pipe as both object and gesture. The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, founded by Albert C. Barnes and housing one of the world's greatest collections of Post-Impressionist painting, holds this alongside major works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Soutine that constitute one of the most coherent visions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century painting ever assembled. Barnes was a famously idiosyncratic collector who installed his works in unconventional arrangements, and the Van Gogh smoker takes its place in that environment as one of the collection's more intimate figure studies. Van Gogh's treatment of the smoking figure reflects both the Dutch tradition of genrespchilderij — informal scenes of people at everyday activities — and his own developing theory of portraiture as the expression of character through color and mark.

The smoker's face is rendered with Van Gogh's mature portrait directness — the pipe and the expression of a man enjoying a quiet moment observed with warmth and specificity. His Arles palette brings warm color to the face. The smoke rising from the pipe may provide an atmospheric element in the upper portion of the composition. Brushwork is confident and direct throughout.