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Vincent van Gogh - L'Arlesienne. Madame Ginoux 1890

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
The subject, Marie Jullian (or Julien), was born in Arles June 8, 1848 and died there August 2, 1911. She married Joseph-Michel Ginoux in 1866 and together they ran the Café de la Gare, 30 Place Lamartine, where Van Gogh lodged from May to mid-September 1888. He had the Yellow House in Arles furnished to settle there.
Evidently until this time, Van Gogh's relations to M. and Mme. Ginoux had remained more or less commercial (the café is the subject of The Night Café), but Gauguin's arrival in Arles altered the situation. His courtship charmed the lady, then about 40 years of age, and in the first few days of November 1888 (November 1, or more probably November 2) Madame Ginoux agreed to have a portrait session for Paul Gauguin, and his friend Van Gogh. Within an hour, Gauguin produced a charcoal drawing while Vincent produced a full-scale painting, "knocked off in one hour".

While in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh painted another five portraits of Madame Ginoux, based on Gauguin's charcoal drawing of November 1888. Of these, one was intended for Gauguin, one for his brother Theo, one for himself and one for Madame Ginoux. The provenance of the version in the Kröller-Müller Museum is not known in detail, but the painting is known to have been previously owned by Albert Aurier, an early champion of Vincent's paintings. The version intended for Madame Ginoux was lost and has not been recovered. This is the version Vincent was delivering to Madame Ginoux in Arles when he suffered his relapse on February 22, 1890. In an unfinished letter to Gauguin that was never sent, Vincent remarked that working on her portrait cost him another month of illness. Gauguin's version was the one with a pink background, currently in the São Paulo Museum of Art. Gauguin was enthusiastic about the portrait, writing:"I’ve seen the canvas of Madame Ginoux. Very fine and very curious, I like it better than my drawing. Despite your ailing state you have never worked with so much balance while conserving the sensation and the interior warmth needed for a work of art, precisely in an era when art is a business regulated in advance by cold calculations."
In a letter to his sister Wil, dated 5 June 1890, Vincent set out his philosophy for doing portraits: "I should like to do portraits which will appear as revelations to people in a hundred years' time. In other words I am not trying to achieve this by photographic likeness but by rendering our impassioned expressions, by using our modern knowledge and appreciation of colour as a means of rendering and exalting character ... The portrait of the Arlésienne has a colourless and matt flesh tone, the eyes are calm and very simple, the clothing is black, the background pink, and she is leaning on a green table with green books. But in the copy that Theo has, the clothing is pink, the background yellowy-white, and the front of the open bodice is muslin in a white that merges into green. Among all these light colours, only the hair, the eyelashes and the eyes form black patches."

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

To Willemien van Gogh. Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Monday, 21 October 1889.
My dear sister,
Thank you very much for your last letter and the news of Cor. Soon you’ll move house, and this will be the last time I write to you at Breda.
Very soon I’ll send Theo the painted studies I had promised, and he’ll get them to you in Leiden. This is what I have: An olive grove – Wheatfield with reaper – Wheatfields and cypresses – Interior – Ploughed fields, morning effect – Orchard in blossom – and a portrait of me. Let’s say that during the course of the next year I send you as many, that would make a little collection with the two that you have, and if you had enough room I would urge you to keep them together, since you’ll probably see artists from time to time in Leiden, and other studies would, I dare believe, soon join mine. Don’t feel uncomfortable about hanging them in a corridor, in the kitchen, on the stairs. My painting is made to be seen above all against a simple background. I try to paint in such a way that it looks good in a kitchen, then sometimes I notice that it looks well in a drawing room too, but I never bother myself about that. Here in the south we have bare walls, white or yellow, or decorated with wallpaper with big coloured flowers. So it seems to me that it’s a matter of proceeding by means of oppositions of bright colours. It’s the same with the frames – the frames I use cost me 5 francs at the most, while the less solid gilded frames would cost 30 or more. And if the painting looks good in a simple frame, why put gilding around it?
Listen now – if I willingly commit myself to continuing to send studies to you and Mother, I’d also have a desire that’s almost a need to do a few more in addition for people I think about often. Thus our cousins, the ladies Mauve and Lecomte, if you see them while in Leiden, tell them that if they like my work I would gladly do some for them, very gladly, but above all, too, I would like Margot Begemann to have a painting of mine. But getting it to her by way of you is more discreet than sending it to her directly. So you would oblige me by taking steps to see that these three people I’ve just mentioned have something of mine. There’s no hurry, but from time to time I do have the right, yes the right to work for friends who are so far away that I’ll probably not see them again.

The doctor from here has been to Paris and went to see Theo, he told him that he does not consider me a lunatic but that the crises I have are of an epileptic nature. So it isn’t alcohol either that was the cause, although of course it doesn’t do one any good. But how difficult it is, how difficult it is to resume one’s ordinary life without being absolutely too demoralized by the certainty of unhappiness. And one clings on to the affections of the past.
So as I tell you, for me it’s almost an absolute need to send something of my work to Holland, and if you succeed in getting some accepted it will be my task to be grateful.
You’ll probably find the interior the ugliest, an empty bedroom with a wooden bed and two chairs – and yet I’ve painted it twice on a large scale. I wanted to arrive at an effect of simplicity as described in Felix Holt. In telling you this you’ll perhaps understand the painting quickly, but it’s likely that it will remain ridiculous for others, not forewarned. To make simplicity with bright colours isn’t easy though, and I find that it can be useful to show that one can be simple with something other than grey, white, black and brown. That is the raison d’être for that study.
You’ll find my wheatfields too yellow, but with me one shouldn’t begin by saying, it’s too yellow, too blue or too green.
You’ll receive these studies in Leiden, I don’t know when. Theo will probably have one framed in Paris, so you can put them in a frame if you wish and then, when the opportunity arises, put them in a crate of paintings for The Hague.
But anyway, everything’s completed as regards my painting, and I assure you that it isn’t the worst I’ve done. I’d also like you to have the red vineyard that Theo has of mine, and if ever I come to Paris again I’ll copy it for you.
Yes, I’m coming back one more time to that interior, I’d certainly like other artists to have, like me, the taste, the need for simplicity. In current society, though, an ideal of simplicity makes life more difficult, and he who has it, this ideal – he merely ends up, as in my case, unable to do what he wants.
But anyway, that however is what society should give an artist, it seems to me, whereas nowadays one is obliged to live in the cafés or low inns. The Japanese have lived in very simple interiors, and what great artists have lived in that country! If a painter is rich in our society, then he lives in a house that resembles a curiosity shop, and that isn’t very artistic either, to my taste. And I myself have suffered greatly from living so much in conditions where order was impossible, that I lost the notion of order and simplicity. That good fellow Isaäcson wanted to write an article on me in a Dutch newspaper on paintings absolutely like those I’m sending you, but I’d be very sad to read such an article, and I wrote to tell him so. Now I’m working on a hospital ward. In the foreground a big black stove around which a few grey or black shapes of patients, then behind the very long ward, tiled with red with the two rows of white beds, the walls white, but a lilac or green white, and the windows with pink curtains, with green curtains, and in the background two figures of nuns in black and white. The ceiling is violet with large beams. I had read an article on Dostoevsky, who had written a book, Souvenirs de la maison des morts, and that spurred me on to begin work again on a large study that I’d begun in the fever ward in Arles. But it’s annoying to paint figures without models.
I’ve read another of Carmen Sylva’s ideas, which is very true: when you suffer a lot – you see everybody at a great distance, and as if at the far end of an immense arena – the very voices seem to come from a long way off. I’ve experienced this in these crises to such a point that all the people I see then seem to me, even if I recognize them – which isn’t always the case – to come from very far away and to be entirely different from what they are in reality, so much do I then seem to see in them pleasant or unpleasant resemblances to people I’ve known in other times and places.
Au revoir, I wish you every success with your work of moving house, and kiss you in thought.
Ever yours,
Vincent