An Old Woman of Arles

Van Gogh got off the train at Arles on 20 February 1888 and found the south of France under snow. He took a room at the Hotel-Restaurant Carrel on the rue Cavalerie, and since nobody in the town yet wanted to sit for a foreign painter with almost no French, the first faces available to him were in the house itself. The sitter here is very probably Elisabeth Garcin, 68 years old, the mother-in-law of the man who kept the place. It is a working study of a head rather than a commissioned portrait, made in his first weeks in Provence. He posted it north to Theo in Paris at the start of May, in the same days as the argument over his bill that ended his stay at the Carrel and moved him into the Yellow House.