La Mousmé

Van Gogh painted La Mousmé in Arles in July 1888 after finishing a translation of Pierre Loti's Madame Chrysanthème, a novel set in Japan. The word 'mousmé' was Loti's term for a young Japanese girl, and Van Gogh used it to describe this young Provençal sitter — Milliet's mistress, possibly — whom he transformed through his Japanese-inflected vision of the South. He wrote to Theo that he had laboured over it for a full week and that it cost him more effort than almost any painting he had made. The work belongs to a group of portraits Van Gogh conceived as his equivalent of Japanese woodblock figure prints.

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.