Portrait du père Tanguy

When Van Gogh painted this in Paris, around 1887, the man in front of him wasn't a patron or a celebrity. He was Julien Tanguy, who ran a small paint-and-supplies shop and let struggling artists settle their bills in canvases when they had no money. Van Gogh sat him down like a sage, hands folded, and filled the wall behind him with Japanese woodblock prints, the kind sold in Tanguy's shop and collected by Van Gogh and his brother Theo. There's Mount Fuji rising just above his hat, cherry blossom, kabuki actors. This is the last and most vivid of three portraits Van Gogh made of him. After Tanguy died, his daughter sold it to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, which is how it ended up in Rodin's own house in Paris.