The Old Officers

In the spring of 1884 Raffaelli hired rooms just off the avenue de l'Opera in Paris and put on a show of his own work. The catalogue carried a long essay by him arguing that in an age that trusted facts and measurement, character was the essential beauty. One of his exhibition categories was simply portrait types of common people. This painting dates from about that year, oil on cardboard laid down on panel, and it turns that programme on a group of aging officers. Van Gogh read the essay in July 1885, in the Dutch village of Nuenen, after his brother Theo sent him the catalogue. He wrote back that the drawings in it were masterly, and that the writing was full of very fine things and full of mistakes, and that he would rather read that than anything else. The painting itself only reached the museum in 1990, out of an art portfolio the British Rail Pension Fund had assembled as an investment.