阿德琳·拉武肖像

Van Gogh painted this in June 1890, in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise north of Paris, where he had settled after leaving the asylum at Saint-Rémy. He had about six weeks left to live. The sitter was Adeline Ravoux, the 13-year-old daughter of the innkeeper he lodged with, and he set her against a plain blue-green ground that makes her face and pale collar carry the picture. Adeline did not like it. She said later that it looked nothing like her, and she was puzzled by all the blue. Decades on, a photograph of her as an old woman survives, and the likeness turns out to be closer than she thought.