Portrait of an artist
Martin Bailey believes a picture languishing in a museum vault is Van Gogh's portrait of Gauguin
In the vaults of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is a portrait of a man with a red beret, long dismissed as the work of an anonymous artist. But the painting is much more exciting than this bland description suggests: the man wearing the jaunty beret is Gauguin and the artist Van Gogh. New evidence shows that it is probably Van Gogh's only portrait of Gauguin, done dur- ing the highly charged period when the two artists were working together in the Yellow House in Arles.
Although the unsigned portrait was accepted as an authentic Van Gogh until the 1920s, it was then rejected and has since languished in store, only twice being exhibited for a few months. The new evi- dence to support the Van Gogh attribution is an unpublished family inventory com- piled in 1891, a year after Vincent's suicide and shortly after the death of his brother Theo. It has now been revealed that, in this list of pictures by Van Gogh, no. 242 is of Gauguin.
The man with the red beret has Gau- guin's profile, with the distinctive nose. The slightly curled-up moustache and short beard in the portrait are cut in the style which Gauguin had adopted at the time. Even the beret is right. Just before his arrival in Arles, Gauguin had spent the summer in Brittany, where he was pho- Portrait of Gauguin by Van Gogh tographed sporting his new beret. Since the portrait came from the Van Gogh family, and was owned by Theo's widow, there can be little doubt that the man in the red beret is Gauguin. No other Van Gogh portraits of Gauguin survive, so it is almost certainly no. 242 in the inventory.
Officially, the Van Gogh Museum has not yet made a judgment on the attribution of the portrait, although its director, Ronald de Leeuw, admits that there is con- siderable evidence to suggest it is a Van Gogh. Even before seeing the crucial refer- ence in the 1891 inventory, he had included it in the new museum guidebook, cap- tioned speculatively, 'Vincent Van Gogh? Portrait of Gauguin?' The German art his- torian Roland Dorn, who has studied the portrait, is even more confident of its authenticity.
The use of impasto, or thickly applied paint, is characteristic of Van Gogh, although the portrait is sketchy and some of the brushwork rather crude. The angular lines of the face are also similar to some of his portraits of late 1888. Stylistically, it appears to be a Van Gogh.
Gauguin is depicted from behind, in the act of painting. On the right side of the background is the picture on which he is working, set at an angle and presumably lying on an easel. Most of the picture depicted in the portrait is yellow, with a small curved area of orange towards the bottom, cut off by Gauguin's right shoul- der.
Although none of the 16 surviving paint- ings done during Gauguin's stay in Arles appears to be the picture in the portrait, there is one lost work recorded in Vin- cent's letters to his brother. Op 25 Novem- ber 1888 Vincent wrote that Gauguin was busy on "a large still-life of an orange- coloured pumpkin and apples and white linen on a yellow background and fore- ground'. He mentioned the still-life again on 4 December, adding that he liked it 'very much'. In making a portrait, Van Gogh would presumably have depicted Gauguin with a work he particularly admired, and the picture in the background may well be a fragment of the lost still-life with a pumpkin.
The portrait must have been done between Gauguin's arrival in Arles on 23 October 1888 and his abrupt departure after Van Gogh mutilated his ear on 23 December, but the date can be narrowed down. Initially Van Gogh painted outdoors in the Provençal landscape and it was only when the weather turned colder towards the end of November that he worked entirely inside. The setting of the portrait is probably the studio of the Yellow House, with the floor tiles appearing as the brown area to the left of Gauguin's shoulder. The pale green above would be the wall and the small rectangular feature at the top might be the part of a picture hanging in the stu- dio.
Tensions between Van Gogh and Gau- guin worsened in mid-December, so the portrait must have been done before then. This makes it possible to' date it to late November or early December 1888, a peri- od when Van Gogh and Gauguin were busily engaged in portraiture. During these few weeks they both painted a series of portraits of members of the families of postman Roulin and cafe-owner Ginoux. The dating of Van Gogh's portrait of Gauguin raises the intriguing possibility that it was originally intended as a study for a companion to Gauguin's celebrated work 'Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers'. Gauguin was working on this painting at the same time he was doing the still-life with a pumpkin, and Van Gogh referred to the two pictures together in his letter of 4 December 1888: 'I very much like a still- life, background and foreground yellow; he is working on a portrait of me.' The result of Gauguin's portraiture was a master- piece, a picture which captures the anguish of Van Gogh.
Van Gogh's portrait of Gauguin is only an oil sketch, done on very rough canvas. The most likely scenario is that Van Gogh began it as a study to be used later for a finished painting. He may have become dis- satisfied with his efforts, possibly feeling that the composition was unsuccessful (Gauguin's figure is rather abruptly cut off on the right). Perhaps it was tensions between the two artists that led to its aban- donment. The painting was then left unfin- ished, which explains why the modelling of
the face is crude. • Although Van Gogh always intended to make a portrait of Gauguin, their friend- ship was shattered by the horrific events of 23 December. In the evening, the two artists had a violent quarrel and Gauguin decided to spend the night in a hotel. Shortly after- wards, Van Gogh slashed off the lower part of his ear, presenting'it to a prostitute at a local brothel. Gauguin immediately left Arles, and, although the two men corre- sponded, they never met again.
A year later, when Vincent was at the asylum at St-Remy, he wrote to his brother Theo about portraiture. 'The desire I have to make portraits just now is terribly intense; indeed, Gauguin and I talked about this and other analogous questions until our nerves were so strained there wasn't a spark of vital warmth left in us,' he explained. The rediscovered portrait is poignant evidence of Van Gogh's efforts to depict his fellow artist, a venture which was so tragically interrupted by the crisis which ended their collaboration in the Yellow House.
Martin Bailey's full account of the portrait is published in the July issue of Apollo.
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