Courtesan (after Eisen)

The Japanese woman here reached Van Gogh by way of a French magazine. In May 1886 Paris illustré gave a whole issue over to Japan, and its cover carried a woodcut of a courtesan by Keisai Eisen. Van Gogh laid a grid over that cover and enlarged the figure onto canvas, holding on to the flat colour and the hard outline of a print.

Around her he assembled a border from other Japanese prints he owned. Bamboo, a pond of water lilies, cranes, and frogs along the bottom. In Parisian slang of those years both grue, a crane, and grenouille, a frog, were words for a prostitute, so the frame may carry a joke. Whether he intended it is not known.

He and his brother Theo had been buying ukiyo-e prints by the hundred, and in the spring of 1887 Vincent hung a selection of them on the walls of a café on the boulevard de Clichy.