Portrait of Patience Escalier

Van Gogh painted Patience Escalier in Arles in August 1888 and immediately recognised it as one of his best portraits. Escalier was a former Camargue cowboy turned gardener — an old man of the fields — and Van Gogh described him to Theo as the equivalent of 'the old peasant of Nuenen' translated into the blazing Provençal light. He wrote that he had wanted to paint Escalier the way he imagined Delacroix would have: with colour as pure expression of character. The orange and blue complementary scheme of the portrait is one of the most audacious colour constructions of his Arles period, and he made a second, slightly different version for his friend the painter Eugène Boch.

The sitter's face glows in amber and orange tones set against a vivid cerulean blue background — the most extreme complementary contrast in Van Gogh's portrait work to this date. The straw hat is rendered with short, curved strokes of yellow and gold. The brushwork throughout is energetic and gestural.