Think of a portrait as a landscape
Mary Tompkins Lewis was announcing in the WSJ recently a new exhibition at the Frick Collection in NYC:
A suntanned traveler from Southern California is currently residing in the Frick Collection, thanks to an exchange program between that august New York institution and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of a Peasant,” one of two paintings and several drawings of the rough-hewn Patience Escalier that he produced in 1888 in the southern French city of Arles, attests in astonishingly original form to the Dutch artist’s ambition to capture in his portraits of rural types the fortitude and quintessential character of the common people of the countryside.
Portrait of a Peasant is one of Van Gogh’s seminal efforts, although not as well known as many of his other works. It came at a time when Vincent was knee deep in combat with the Symbolist debates going on in Paris at the time, particularly as it applied to religious imagery:
When Bernard (a fellow painter) defended Symbolism by charting its half-century rise from the scandals of Charles Baudelaire, an early champion of both Delacroix and Wagner, to the heights of the Parisian avant-garde, Vincent took up the gauntlet. In sweeping, vehement terms, he derided the Symbolists’ images as “follies,” “stupidities,” and “sterile metaphysical meditations.” He chastised them especially for turning their backs on the great artists of the Dutch Golden Age who “painted things just as they are.” “Hammer into your head that master Frans Hals,” he instructed Bernard; “hammer into your head the no less great and universal master … Rembrandt van Rijn, that broad-minded naturalistic man.” The argument. escalated to accusations of cultural plagiarism as Vincent dismissed two centuries of French art as nothing more than “Dutch paste solidly stuffed into vulgar French noodles.”
Nothing about the Symbolist tutelage from Pont-Aven incensed Vincent more than the call for religious imagery. Bernard had first reopened these wounds in April by sending some religious poetry for Vincent’s review. Fired by the Symbolist debates in Paris, newly befriended by Albert Aurier, a young Symbolist poet, and reawakened to his own Catholicism by a love affair in Brittany that spring, Bernard arrived in Pont-Aven with a portfolio of mystic religious imagery in one hand and a Bible in the other. Gauguin received the new ideas openly, and soon both artists were busily planning works to plumb the Good Book’s deep well of mystery and meaning.
After such a warm reception, Bernard must have been shocked by the storm of protest that greeted his ideas in Arles. “How small-minded the old story really is!” Vincent fired back immediately. “My God! Does the world consist solely of Jews?” With inexplicable fury, he railed against “that deeply saddening Bible, which arouses our despair and indignation, which seriously offends us and thoroughly confuses us with its pettiness and infectious foolishness.” Only the figure of Christ survived Vincent’s wrath — he called it the “kernel” of consolation “inside a hard rind and bitter pulp.” But he belittled Bernard’s ambition to capture Christ’s image as “artistic neurosis” and ridiculed his chances of succeeding. “Only Delacroix and Rembrandt have painted the face of Christ in such a way that I can feel him,” he scoffed. “The rest rather make me laugh.”
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life
There are many of Vincent’s rants that are taken out of context to promote an anti-Catholic point of view. The same thing happens with Dostoevsky but many forget that the Church was involved in activities in the 19th century that were objectionable. You can find many debates in our own day that provoke anti-Church sentiments but do not in any way question the love of the Church that those making the statements truly have. Here we seem to have the same phenomena:
The rant spilled across letter after letter, to Paris as well as Pont-Aven. “Oh, my dear boy,” he wrote Theo, “I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting.” He pounded Bernard with the crimes of Christianity, especially the “barbarity” of Catholic conversions in the New World, and mocked its modern-day hypocrisies.
His months in Catholic Provence, with its medieval festivals and mystical devotions, had already roused childhood feelings of Protestant isolation and anti-papist iconoclasm. (He described the Gothic church in Arles, St. Trophime, as “cruel and monstrous” and, worse, “Roman.”) In July, he undertook to reread the complete works of Balzac, as if to inoculate himself against the world of spirits and superstitions that surrounded him.
But the push from Pont-Aven was too strong, the obsession from the past toe deep and unsettled, to resist for long. That same month, even as his letters filled up with bitter denunciations, Vincent tried his hand at the denounced imagery. He painted “a big study, an olive garden, with a figure of Christ in blue and orange, and an angel in yellow.” It was the image that had haunted him through a lifetime of failures and campaigns for forgiveness: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Only now he saw it in the vivid color of the new art: “Red earth, bilk green and blue, olive trees with violet and carmine trunks, green-gray and blue foliage, [and] a citron-yellow sky.” But the effort collapsed. In a fit of panic (he later called it “horror”) that foretold the catastrophes to come, he angrily took a knife and scraped the offending image off. He kept his failure secret from Bernard and Gauguin. To Theo, he blamed it on the lack of models. “I must not do figures of that importance without models,” he vowed. But surely he knew the block lay deeper.
The failed image triggered a fresh wave of resistance. He scolded his colleagues for resorting to the static, fabular world of the Bible, when the world of nature all around them — especially in Arles — offered so many subjects ripe with significance: sowers and sheaves, sunflowers and cypresses, suns and stars — all opportunities to “paint the infinite.” “It is actually one’s duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature,” he declared, taking aim at the Symbolists’ dry metaphysical exercises. “We are in need of gaiety and happiness, of hope and love.” And why confront the terrible, perfect countenance of Christ. he demanded, when sublimity could be found in faces and figures everywhere: “Do I make myself understood?” he wrote Bernard fiercely. “I am just trying to make you see this single great truth: one can paint all of humanity by the simple means of portraiture.”
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life
Vincent’s single great truth is on display with Portrait of a Peasant and if you are in NYC greatly worth a trip to the Frick Collection on the upper east side to enjoy it.
To many in late 19th century France, these rugged denizens of the provinces represented the moral bedrock of the Third Republic. [Patience] Escalier was a former oxherd from the Camargue, a region of salt marshes and miry ranch lands that stretches south from Arles to the sea, who toiled in his old age at a farm in the Crau, a rocky area east of Arles immortalized by van Gogh in his landscapes. In letters to his brother, Theo, the painter described his humble subject as a real-life embodiment of the heroic workers who had figured in the pastoral paintings of Jean-François Millet, and as a continuation of his own sober studies of solitary Dutch laborers executed earlier in the 1880s, before he moved to France.
The highly literate Van Gogh also drew on such realist novels as Emile Zola’s controversial “La Terre,” published the year before, which traced the bitter realities of rural life that wedded its rustic inhabitants to the soil. The painter feared, however, that Parisian viewers would see in his charged, emotional portraits from Arles (“paintings in clogs,” he called them, using Millet’s words) only caricature or exaggeration, rather than the collective portrayal of humanity in which he hoped to convey, with radiant light and vibrant color, a sense of the eternal.
Mary Tompkins Lewis, Portrait of a Peasant
As Ms Lewis noted above Vincent’s model has a unique essence, one that Vincent expands upon here:
At the beginning of August, soon after the success of Anquetin’s The Peasant triggered a rush to rustic imagery in both Pont-Aven and Arles, Vincent recruited an old gardener named Patience Escalier to model for him. He described Escalier as “a poor old peasant, whose features bear a very strong resemblance to Father, only coarser.” Vincent painted him hurriedly, placing his deeply creased, sun-brazed face against a cobalt background and dressing him in a bright turquoise blouse and yellow straw hat much like those Vincent himself wore on his painting trips into the countryside.
To Theo and the comrades in Pont-Aven, he advertised Escalier as an icon out of Millet or Zola (“a man with a hoe, a former drover of the Camargue”), a primitive antidote to “highly civilized Parisian” ways, as well as a Daumier caricature, like the amiable giant Roulin. “I dare believe that Gauguin and you would understand,” he wrote Bernard. “You know what a peasant is, how strongly he reminds one of a wild beast, when you have found one of the true race.”
Vincent quickly fell out with his model over payment terms, but the old man’s image lingered in his eye throughout the arguments with Bernard over religious imagery. When he finally lured Escalier back into the studio at the end of the month, he posed the grizzled gardener leaning on a cane, his hands folded in an attitude of prayer. From under his wide-brimmed straw hat, his old eyes stare serenely into the distance with a sad, long-suffering, heaven-fixed gaze. Beyond his sloping blue shoulders, the world is filled with “flashing orange” representing the “furnace” of harvests past, Vincent said, as well as the “luminous gold” of the sunset to come, and the sunrise beyond.
Listen to how Vincent speaks about another portraiture that he did at around the same time, the painter Boch:
To memorialize this brief manna of friendship, Vincent persuaded Boch to sit for a portrait. Despite their previous antagonism, Vincent had been laying elaborate plans for this portrait for some time. “I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend,” he had written Theo after an encounter with Boch in early August, “a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature.” Despite Boch’s dark hair, Vincent imagined painting him as “a blond man [with] orange tones, chromes and pale-yellow” highlights in his hair:
Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I [will] paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I [will] get a mysterious effect. like a star in the depths of an azure sky.
When Boch finally sat for him, Vincent faithfully rendered his subject’s razor visage and dark hair (with blond highlights only in his mustache and beard. But he dressed him in a yellow-orange coat and stood him against a background of the deepest blue he could devise — just as he had imagined it. He crowned Boch’s head with a thin corona of citron yellow — exactly the color of the “nimbus” around the Savior’s head in Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee and flecked the dark void with stars shining yellow and orange from worlds beyond.
It was exactly the scheme he had tried and destroyed in his Garden of Gethsemane: “a figure of Christ in blue and orange.”
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life
For Vincent approached the transcendent truths required of Biblical art in another way separate and distinct from his Symbolist colleagues who were all the talk of Paris at the time:
Images like these, Vincent argued, expressed their transcendent truths not in the biblical finery that Bernard urged, but in a new and different garb: color. Whether through “the mingling of opposites” or “the vibrations of kindred tones,” Vincent claimed he could address the deepest mysteries of life –the Symbolists’ grail — without resorting to the follies of religion. He could speak directly to the heart “through the language of color alone.” Thus, the sunset colors on Escalier’s face expressed “the eagerness of a soul,” while the light tone of Boch’s figure against the night sky expressed “the thought of a brow” and “hope upon a star.”
The right color combinations, he insisted, could arouse the full range of human emotions: from the “anguish” of broken tones to the “absolute restfuIness” of balanced ones; from the “passion” of red and green to the “gentle consolation” of lilac and yellow. In describing his colors, especially to Bernard, Vincent adopted the Symbolists’ vocabulary (repeatedly invoking “the eternal,” “the mysterious,” “infinity,” and “dreams”), but defiantly declared himself a “rational colorist” and boasted of the complicated calculations that guided his palette — Seurat-like terms anathema to the Symbolists’ manifesto of sensation.
And he rejected outright Cloisonnism’s relegation of color to a mere element of design — a decorative deduction — rather than the “forceful expression” of “an ardent temperament.”
That temperament expressed itself nowhere more forcefully, or defiantly, than in brushwork. In Pont-Aven, Vincent’s comrades had been developing a paint surface that barely betrayed a brush at all. Following Anquetin’s lead, they had pursued the Cloisonnist rhetoric about “plates” of color and the paradigm of stained glass to their logical conclusion. Where Cezanne had used brushy, thinly painted planes and brickworklike strokes to construct his faceted scenes, Gauguin and Bernard divided their images into areas of pure color and then filled each area with thinned paint applied in smooth, impassive strokes. Vincent surely knew of these innovations through his correspondence with both artists, and even occasionally tried them himself when the urge to solidarity overtook him.
But inevitably his manic brush rebelled. His letter sketches to Pont-Aven continued to show only the coloring-book dogma of blocks of pure color, each with its label of “rouge” or “bleu.”
But in his studio, unseen by his colleagues, his draftsman’s hand tirelessly filled those blocks with flights of brushwork in a pattern book of textures and complex topographies of enlever paint. Sometimes he followed the contours of his subjects with undulating trenches of color, faithfully tracing the spiky needles of a pine tree or the snaking branches of a vineyard. Other times, in the background or on the plates mandated by the new gospel, his brush would break into slathering riffs of strokes, turning a cloudless sky into a churning sea or a plowed field into a scumbled battleground. In one particularly intense eruption of impasto — Vincent himself called such episodes “violent” — he loaded his brush with paint and transformed a picturesque streamside mill into a castle of pigment, shattering every plane — walls, roof, sky, and stream — into defiantly visible paint strokes, each one a silent protest, a shake of his fist, against the orthodoxy issuing from Pont-Aven.
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life
In the end Vincent’s approach was eclectic and directed by what he saw and felt:
Simplification and exaggeration, and brushwork, had to serve some deeper emotional truth. In 
describing how he painted the square in front of the Yellow House — a patch of ill-tended public real estate — Vincent sheepishly admitted to “leaving out some trees” and shrubs that are not in character…. To get at that character,” he said, the fundamental truth of it.”
This was not “imagining,” he hastened to add, rejecting the Symbolists term as Bernard and Gauguin used it. He imagined nothing, he insisted; only looked and felt. He neither ignored nature, nor slavishly followed it; he “consumed” it. “I do not invent the picture,” he corrected Bernard; “on the contrary, I find it already there in nature; I just have to free it.”
When Rembrandt painted angels, Vincent explained, “[he] did not invent anything.. . he knew them; he felt them there.” So, too, when Vincent looked at the trafficked square, he squinted his eyes and saw not the trompe l’oeil reality of overgrown pathways in un-Dutch neglect, but the riotously blooming oleander bushes — “loaded with fresh flowers, and quantities of faded blooms as well, their green continually renewing itself in fresh, strong shoots, apparently inexhaustibly” — an image of angelic consolation that bore no more relationship to reality, he argued, than reality bore to a colorless photograph.
This was the only theory that Vincent’s refractory art could bear – the inevitable expression of a synthetic intelligence bound forever to a lunging heart. “When I am moved by something,” he said, “these are the only things that appear to have any deep meaning.” And painting those things “absorbs me so much,” he confessed, “that I let myself go, never thinking of a single rule.”
Obsessively introspective and often alone, Vincent thought deeply about questions that preoccupied the writers, artists, and philosophers he read; but his personal theories on art, as on everything else, were neither coherent nor consistent. He never could command consistency from himself (not even within the same letter, much less between correspondents), nor could he keep his ideas isolated from the swirling currents of his emotions. Even within a single painting, his palette and brush often skidded from theory to theory, from model to model, in pursuit of the emotion that seized him — the only dogma that mattered. “What do these differences matter,” he wrote Bernard, declaring his independence by defending his deviations, “when the great thing after all is to express oneself strongly?”
Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life
In the Portrait of a Peasant, we see Vincent’s triumph: the landscape of southern France subtly drawn in one of its subjects:
Van Gogh relished the opportunity to paint his subject late that summer, as he explained to Boch, “in the very furnace of harvest time, deep in the south. Hence the oranges, blazing like red-hot iron, hence the old gold tones, glowing in the darkness.” The peasant is pictured as one with his Provençal environs.
Susan Grace Galassi, the Frick senior curator who coordinated the painting’s presentation in New York, has beautifully described how thick furrows and ridges of paint model Escalier’s craggy, weathered face as if it were a landscape, and how the figure’s domed, yellow straw hat serves as a blazing, surrogate sun against a contrasting field of cobalt and darker Prussian blues. Van Gogh’s heavily impastoed, basketweave strokes, which defy the delicate touches and decorative stippling of his Impressionist peers, make that dense sky palpable. In contrast, the green smock that defines Escalier’s torso is evoked with thinner bands of pale blue, emerald and zinc white.
The figure’s chin is framed with discrete strokes of green, a touch of yellow paint crusts on his lip. Above, a bold lemon stripe and a lighter one in green that the painter Henri Matisse would appreciate streak down the ridge of his nose. We hardly notice Escalier’s impossibly projecting shoulder at left, lightly traced with a squiggly blue line, or the absence of a corresponding limb at right, because our attention is focused on the face at dead-center that stares out at us. Concentric circles of paint that surround Escalier’s hollowed eyes and touches of molten red in their inner corners make his gaze inescapable, even hypnotic; it freezes us into place before him. With the bold vermillion outline that van Gogh often used to secure his figures amid a maelstrom of tactile paint strokes, he renders his subject iconic.
In such emotive paintings of rural types that are threaded through Van Gogh’s brief but prolific career, the intensity of his empathy and enthusiasm for these remnants of a preindustrial world is captured with unmatched power. The unmodulated, saturated tones and vehement handling of paint that characterize the Pasadena painting seem to reflect in raw pictorial terms what drew van Gogh repeatedly to his subject: In a letter about Escalier written that same August to the artist Emile Bernard, he marveled at “how much of the wild animal there is when you come across someone pure-bred.”
Mary Tompkins Lewis, Portrait of a Peasant
Old Subject, New Approach — Richard Cork
May 13, 2013By breaking away from the domestic context favored in so many other treatments of the Annunciation, Jan van Eyck created an image packed with coded messages about the triumph of the new faith over the old scriptures.
Mr. Cork’s latest book is “The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals” (Yale, 2012). This article was printed in the WSJ a while back.
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Nothing in the Bible story is more astounding than the pivotal instant when, quite suddenly, the Virgin Mary receives an unexpected visitor. Brandishing a resplendent pair of wings, the Angel Gabriel descends from heaven and gives the young woman some shocking news: She will conceive and give birth to Jesus, the Son of God.
Most Renaissance painters who tackled this popular subject ensured that a sizable gap divorces Mary from Gabriel. But when Jan van Eyck took up the challenge, he broke through to a radical alternative. Based in Bruges as court painter to Philip the Good, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, van Eyck was renowned as a pioneer of naturalism in the new medium of oil paint.
And in a tall, narrow painting made about 1435, executed with mesmerizing precision and a wealth of meanings, he removes the setting from the Virgin’s home. Instead, “The Annunciation” now occurs in a richly detailed church. By breaking away from the domestic context favored in so many other treatments of the subject, van Eyck creates an image packed with coded messages about the triumph of the new faith over the old scriptures.
At first, our eyes are caught up in the intensity of the encounter between Angel and Virgin. In this thin panel, we grow conscious of how very close these figures are to one another. Although the ecclesiastical setting could hardly be more formal, their encounter feels like a private moment, no doubt reflecting van Eyck’s own awareness that Mary is now being impregnated with the seed of the Christ child. Rays of golden light shoot down from an upper window, bearing the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. One ray descends directly onto the crown of the Virgin’s head, piercing her so that Jesus can be conceived.
No wonder she seems so apprehensive and confused. Van Eyck makes no attempt to invest her with poised, spurious glamour. She is a real woman, with a long nose, protruding ear and the beginnings of a double chin. Her head is tilted, probably to acknowledge and receive the golden ray. This diagonal inclination makes her look unsteady, and both her hands are raised as if in shock. But there is also something worshipful about these blanched, wavering fingers. Directly below them, lilies soar up from a vase to symbolize the Virgin’s purity. Painted with consummate skill, the flowers affirm the principle of vitality and fresh growth.
As for the Angel, van Eyck has transformed this divine messenger into a magnificent apparition. Gabriel’s extraordinary rainbow wings echo the dove flying down through the church. Yet they are far larger than the bird’s wings, and shimmer with an iridescent glow. The Angel’s elaborately woven cope looks like a priest’s vestment of the 1430s. So it must have given Gabriel a contemporary appeal to viewers at that time, and the fabric is dominated by an enormous dianthus flower, said to be the flower of God. The petals spring to life through van Eyck’s virtuoso handling of light.
The same luminosity illuminates the Virgin’s face, strikes the crystal scepter clutched by the Angel, and dances all over the bejeweled accoutrements he is wearing with such pride. The colors appear to glow from within, and this sense of ecstasy is embodied above all in Gabriel himself.
His smiling, tender face glistens as much as his fair, curly hair. He looks transported with excitement, and lifts his pale, slender index finger in a gesture of friendly beckoning. With amazing boldness, he pushes his left leg toward Mary’s body. It seems at first like an invasive movement, making us wonder if the Virgin might feel threatened by Gabriel’s proximity.
But there is nothing remotely alarming about this radiant messenger, and the words that issue, in Latin, from his parted lips confirm his innate gentleness: “Hail, full of grace.” Although Mary seems hesitant, she responds by declaring: “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.” Yet her words are not addressed simply to the Angel. Van Eyck paints them upside-down and back to front, so that God may read them more easily from his heavenly vantage.
As well as evoking a God of Love rather than a stern God of Judgment, this inexhaustible painting is packed with references to the old Scriptures and the victory of the new faith, Christianity. Why did van Eyck set his “Annunciation” in a church? As our eyes travel over this superbly convincing location, we realize that he is telling us a great deal about the larger meaning of the dramatic event occurring here.
At the top, God stands isolated in a stained-glass window and personifies the ancient Jewish belief that He was alone. But gradually, as we move down the church, the old insistence on a solitary deity is replaced by the Christian Trinity. Symbolically ranged behind Mary’s face are three windows, announcing the triple identity of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.
Hence van Eyck’s readiness to make Gabriel such a glittering figure. He is heralding the advent of the new religion, and the wall-paintings above him depict Old Testament scenes regarded by medieval theologians as events that prefigure Jesus’ life and fate. After the baby Moses is handed to Pharaoh’s daughter, the adult Moses receives the Ten Commandments. And on the church floor, violence erupts. The victorious David hacks off Goliath’s head, while Absalom — tucked away behind a prayer-stool — hangs by his hair from a tree as a grim prophecy of Christ’s crucifixion.
Nearly five centuries after it was painted, “The Annunciation” became the focus of a battle between the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and an obsessive American multimillionaire. In June 1930, Hermitage officials were appalled by Stalin’s decision to sell key paintings in its collection to wealthy foreign collectors. But Andrew Mellon, the U.S. secretary of the Treasury, bought “The Annunciation” with 20 other Hermitage paintings before locking them away in a basement near his Washington home. And in 1935, after the U.S. government brought tax-evasion charges against him, Mellon suddenly announced that he would found a great gallery in the capital.
Six years later, the National Gallery of Art was duly inaugurated by President Franklin Roosevelt. And one of its star paintings is undoubtedly “The Annunciation.” Its impact today prompts many visitors to scrutinize this luminous image with a sense of wonder, just as Christians have always marveled at the infinitely mysterious miracle of the Virgin birth.
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