Paul Gauguin - Old Man with a Stick 1888
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Old Man with a Stick 1888
70x45cm oil/canvas
Petit Palais, City of Paris Fine Art Museum
The image is only being used for informational and educational purposes
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From Petit Palais, City of Paris Fine Art Museum:
This portrait of an old man sitting down was painted during Gauguin’s short stay in Arles. From 23 October to 26 December 1888 the painter was based in a workshop in the south of France, where he had been invited by Van Gogh. The two artists lived and worked very intensively there.
Gauguin arrived from Pont-Aven where he had just painted an exceptional picture entitled Vision of the Sermon (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland). Moving definitively away from Impressionism, he developed an original style and intensified the colours that he used arbitrarily.
Vincent, who had been based in the south of France since February 1888, painted luminous sunflowers. He was also mainly concerned with painting self-portraits and portraits: “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise,” (Letter from Vincent to Theo, 3 September 1888). It was in this state of mind that in August 1888 he painted a portrait of Patience Escalier, an old oxherd from the Camargue, in front of a bright orange background, to suggest a sunset according to Vincent. The position of the old man’s hands crossed over the stick appears again, almost identically, in the picture painted by Gauguin during the final weeks of their cohabitation.