Portrait of Julien Tanguy

Julien Tanguy sold paint. In 1871 he had fought for the Paris Commune, was captured, sentenced to two years' hard labour at Brest, and after friends got him released he was kept out of Paris for two years more. He came back and in 1873 opened a shop in the rue Clauzel selling colours and canvas, where he took pictures in payment from painters who could not settle their bills and hung them in his window. That is where Van Gogh met him in 1887, in his second year in Paris. This is the first of the three portraits he painted of Tanguy that year, and the plainest. In the two that came after it he set the old man in front of a wall of Japanese woodblock prints, the kind he and his brother Theo were then buying by the hundred.