Le Fumeur

Van Gogh got off the train at Arles on 20 February 1888 expecting the south, and found the town buried in snow. In his first weeks there he made eight studies. Research published by the Van Gogh Museum in 2024 puts this pipe smoker among them, painted around 27 February, where the picture had for decades been placed at the end of that year instead. So it is one of the first things he did in Arles, a stranger's face painted within a week of arriving, months before the yellow house and the sunflowers. The Barnes Foundation, which has kept it in Philadelphia under the number BF119, points out the man's mouth clenched to hold the pipe and a few horizontal dashes standing in for smoke.