Portrait of Eugène Boch

In the late summer of 1888, van Gogh was living in Arles and thinking hard about how to paint a person. In a letter to his brother Theo he described wanting to paint a friend who dreams great dreams, and then to push the background past any ordinary wall into the richest, deepest blue he could mix, so the head would sit against something like infinity. The friend was Eugène Boch, a Belgian painter passing through the south. Van Gogh nicknamed him the poet, sharpened the narrow, greyhound-like face, and set it against exactly that field of star-flecked blue. He hung the finished head in his own yellow house. Boch's sister later gave it to the French state, which is how a private token of friendship ended up in a national museum.