Portrait of Patience Escalier

In the summer of 1888, working fast in Arles, Van Gogh went looking for a face that carried the whole life of the southern countryside. He found Patience Escalier, an old cowherd from the Camargue marshes who now tended a garden, and painted him in a straw hat with a weathered, sunburnt face. In his letters he compared the man to the smell of the earth, and admitted he was pushing colour further than nature allowed, the orange, the fierce blue, a red that isn't really there. He had been calling himself a peasant painter since his Dutch years. He made two versions within weeks and told his brother Theo the second was the better of them.