L'Arlésienne

In the first days of November 1888, Gauguin had just moved into the Yellow House in Arles, and for a few weeks the two painters worked side by side. Their neighbour Marie Ginoux, who ran the cafe across the square, agreed to sit. In a single hour Van Gogh laid down this portrait while Gauguin worked up a charcoal drawing of the same pose. She wears the costume of a woman of Arles, the local dress the title names, one hand resting against her cheek. The lemon-yellow ground and the deep blue of her dress are set down almost without shading, colour standing in for light. Within weeks the two men had quarrelled and Van Gogh cut his own ear. He would return to this face more than a year later, working from Gauguin's old drawing, from memory, in the asylum at Saint-Remy.