Portrait of a woman

Nobody is certain who this woman is. The name most often attached to her is Madame Tanguy, wife of Julien Tanguy, the Paris paint dealer everyone called Père Tanguy. He ran a small shop that sold colours and canvas near Montmartre, and he would take paintings in trade when an artist could not settle the bill, which is how his walls filled with work by the young and the broke, Van Gogh among them. Van Gogh painted Tanguy himself more than once, seated against a wall of Japanese prints. Whether this sitter really is the dealer's wife has never been settled, and the museum still keeps a question mark beside the title. She looks out from a dark dress built up in short, dry strokes of colour, her hands folded in her lap.