Portrait of Adeline Ravoux

In the summer of 1890 Van Gogh was lodging above a small inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris, and painting at an astonishing rate, close to a canvas a day. One of his subjects was the innkeeper's daughter, Adeline Ravoux, who was thirteen. She sat for him only once and never liked the result, complaining that the girl in blue did not look like her. Van Gogh painted her three times anyway, shown in profile in a wash of cool blues against a blue-green ground. A few weeks after this, Adeline was in the house when Van Gogh came back badly wounded and, two days later, died. She grew up to write down what she remembered of the quiet Dutchman who had stayed upstairs.