Whose portrait was found under Van Gogh's "Patch of Grass", and why the artist painted it over

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Vincent Van Gogh is an exceptional master painter whose work has had a timeless influence on 20th century painting. He created over 2000 works in just 10 years of creative activity. Working mainly in the post-impressionist style, Van Gogh began his work with dark, gray, earthy colors and dark themes, which are not at all characteristic of the Van Gogh we know today. And this artist has one canvas that combines the two most important periods of Van Gogh's life. What is this canvas and why is it called double?

Vincent Van Gogh, mostly self-taught and underappreciated during his lifetime, has produced over 900 paintings and 1,100 works in a decade as an artist. Van Gogh's early work, influenced by Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School painters, includes harsh portraits of Dutch peasants and depressing rural landscapes. In 1886-88 he moved to Paris, where Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism had a great influence on his painting. Inspired by the new style, Van Gogh realized that his own palette was too dark and already old-fashioned. He lit up his palette, experimenting with shorter strokes, impasto and complementary colors.

Van Gogh also became interested in Japanese art and collected Japanese prints with his brother Theo. In the spring and summer of the following year, he regularly painted outdoors in the village of Asnieres, near Paris. Later, in a letter to his sister Willemina, he wrote that in the landscape he began to "see more color than before." The paintings he made in Paris epitomize a bold post-impressionist style. These are the very works that are best known today. And one mysterious double canvas belongs to them …

A piece of grass

The painting "A Piece of Grass" we are analyzing was painted just during the period of his experiments in painting in Asnieres. It was painted in 1887 and today belongs to the Kröller-Müller Museum. Each brushstroke in this picture is absolutely the same as a patch of grass: a stalk, a petal, or the grass itself. To do this, Van Gogh chooses a close-up of a field of grass - a composition that is often found in Japanese prints. He seems to enlarge each individual blade of grass, flower and depicts them very carefully and with great sophistication in a light and colorful palette.

The second bottom of the canvas is a portrait of a peasant woman

Early studies of the Patch of Grass painting revealed the dim outlines of a human head, but the woman's face only emerged from the center of the work after the painting was subjected to fluorescence spectroscopy. The portrait of a peasant woman, Vincent Van Gogh, was revealed in extraordinary detail through the use of X-ray techniques that had never before been applied to painting.

Thus, for his work with the image of a patch of grass, Van Gogh used a canvas on which he had painted earlier. It is assumed that Van Gogh painted it in 1884-1885, while in the Brabant town of Nuenen, that is, about two and a half years before he painted a patch of grass on it. In Nuenen, Van Gogh writes his first works on the theme of folk life. These are paintings in dark earthy tones, mostly portraits of peasants. During this period, he wanted to become a kind of artistic representative of disadvantaged classes, a social concern that would follow him throughout his career. This aspiration led to his first masterpiece "The Potato Eaters" (April 1885).

Van Gogh wrote that in this work, the composition of the painting shows that people on it eat with the same hands with which they worked in the ground. They deserve this meal. Having become acquainted with impressionism, the master decided once and for all to leave the dark colors, which he had studied and tried for so long, in order to switch to a more color palette. The artistic impressionist movement was just beginning to gain popularity when Van Gogh arrived in Paris. The artist was especially interested in the studies of the Pointillists - neo-impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac in the field of the division of the spectrum of light.

What is the special significance of Van Gogh's double painting?

What distinguishes two canvases - two periods of Van Gogh's life - "A Patch of Grass" and "Portrait of a Peasant Woman"? Global transformations in the vision and work of Van Gogh. The tremendous contrast between his bleak use of color during the Nuenen period and his bright and light palette in Paris is striking. Van Gogh's extremely rapid and radical style change is embodied in this single painting.

Scientists scanned the image for two days with the thinnest X-rays generated by the synchrotron, a machine that accelerates subatomic particles. The atoms in the paint layers transmit fluorescent X-rays. And elements from certain paint pigments, for example, from mercury and antimony, made it possible to obtain a "color photograph" of a hidden work. Van Gogh often painted over his early works. According to experts, about a third of his early paintings are hidden by other compositions. The Grass Patch was completed in Paris in 1887 and belongs to the Kroller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.

Emotionally unstable and impulsive, Van Gogh ultimately collapsed and moved to an orphanage in the south of France, where he painted landscapes, portraits, interiors and still lifes saturated with personal symbolism. And today Van Gogh, unrecognized during his lifetime, is one of the most famous and brilliant artists, and his works are sold for fabulous money.