Portrait of a Patient in Saint Paul Hospital

Portrait of a Patient in Saint Paul Hospital: Vincent van Gogh

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Vincent van Gogh Oil Painting - Portrait of a Patient in Saint Paul Hospital

Keywords: Portrait, Patient, Saint, Paul, Hospital

Work Overview: Portrait of a Patient in Saint-Paul Hospital
Vincent van Gogh
Date: 1889; Saint-rémy-de-provence, France *
Style: Post-Impressionism
Genre: portrait
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 32.5 x 23.5 cm
Location: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Van Gogh, known for his landscapes, seemed to find painting portraits his greatest ambition.[52] To his sister he wrote, "I should like to paint portraits which appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavor to achieve this through photographic resemblance, but my means of our impassioned emotions -- that is to say using our knowledge and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character."[52]

While Van Gogh had few opportunities to make portraits, he completed at least three at Saint-Rémy.

François Trabuc, who was the chief orderly at Saint-Paul, and his wife, Jeanne both sat for van Gogh. François Trabuc had a look of "contemplative calm" which van Gogh found interesting in spite of the misery he had witness at Saint-Paul and a Marseille hospital during outbreaks of cholera. He wrote to Theo of Trabuc’s character, a military presence and "small keen black eyes". If it were not for his intelligence and kindness, his eyes could seem like that of a bird of prey.[53]

Van Gogh describes Jeanne Trabuc as a "washed-out kind of a woman, and unhappy, resigned creature of little consequence and so insignificant that I have a great desire to paint this dusty blade of grade. I’ve chatted with her a few times when I was doing some olive trees behind their little house, and she told me that she didn’t think I was ill -- indeed you would say the same right now if you could see me working."[54]

While in Saint-Paul, Van Gogh wrote of other patients and their support for one another, "Though here there are some patients very seriously ill, the fear and horror of madness that I used to have has already lessened a great deal. And though here you continually hear terrible cries and howls like beasts in a menagerie, in spite of that people get to know each other very well and help each other when their attacks come on."[55]

Van Gogh wrote of a portrait he began in October 1889, "At the moment I am working on a portrait of one of the patients here. It is odd that when you have spent some time with them and have got used to them, you no longer think of them as mad."

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