Giovane contadino

Van Gogh painted this young man in 1889, during the year he had checked himself into the asylum of Saint-Paul at Saint-Rémy, in Provence, after cutting his ear in Arles. Between his own attacks of illness he was allowed to paint, and when he could not go far he worked from the people around him, an attendant, a patient, a local labourer. The sitter here was long known simply as a peasant or a gardener, painted with rough, restless strokes, a straw hat blazing yellow against green. Only recently did a note surface identifying him as a young man named Jean, the son of a travelling basket-maker. The picture later hung in a museum in Rome, was stolen off the wall in 1998, and turned up again about seven weeks later.