Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier)

Van Gogh painted this in the full heat of August 1888, a few months into his stay at Arles, and the man is real: Patience Escalier, a former cowherd from the Camargue who had become a gardener. Van Gogh wanted his skin to carry the whole landscape of the south. He pushed the colour past anything he can have seen on the man's face, burnt orange and red set against a blazing blue, the straw hat glowing like the sun it worked under. He told his brother he was after the furnace of harvest time, deep in the south. He made two versions of Escalier within a few weeks, and this is the one where the eyes hold you hardest.