The Grandmother

The woman in black is Sophie Albertine Bodin-Lallement, Bernard's grandmother on his mother's side, born in 1813. Her husband had just died, and she came to live with the family at Asnières on the edge of Paris, where she sat for her grandson more than once. He painted her in the autumn of 1887 in the wooden shed he had just put up as a studio in his parents' garden, laying the figure in with blue outlines first, then the skin and the features, then black contours around the whole thing. Vincent van Gogh, living in Paris that year and trading pictures with younger painters, took this one in exchange for his own self-portrait in a straw hat. The following August, writing from Arles, he told Bernard what he thought of it. You've never been closer to Rembrandt, my dear chap. Bernard painted his grandmother twice more that year, and those two canvases are now in Boston and in Kansas City.