Vecchio con un bastone

Gauguin painted this in Arles in the autumn of 1888, during the nine weeks he shared a small yellow house with Van Gogh. Money was short, so he worked on a length of coarse brown sackcloth he had bought cheap, and he barely covered it. The rough jute still shows through everywhere except the old man's face and hands, where the paint sits thicker. The armchair the sitter leans on is the same one Van Gogh put into his own still life that November, the picture he called Gauguin's Chair. Within weeks the two men had fallen out badly and Gauguin walked away for good. He never signed this one, and it looks like he set it aside unfinished.