L'Italienne

Van Gogh painted this portrait in Paris in 1887, of Agostina Segatori, who ran a cafe called the Tambourin on the Boulevard de Clichy. She had modeled years earlier for Corot and Manet, and for a few months she and van Gogh were close; she let him hang his pictures on her cafe walls in his first real exhibition. By the time he painted her the affair had cooled. He sets her against a flat yellow ground with no shadow and no depth, a red scarf on her head, her striped skirt and bodice bordered like a Japanese print. Red and green run through her face, the pairing he would later say he used to catch the fiercest human feelings in paint.