Unlike some of his confrères - Cézanne, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin, for instance - who wrote little or nothing on the topic, van Gogh strove to project a theoretical, as well as a practical view of the role and importance of the portrait. And at no time in his short ten-year career as an artist did he subject the portrait to such ambitious scrutiny as during the summer and autumn of 1888 when he was living in Arles.

Perhaps his most consistent vision of portraiture was not only how it should be for him, but what it could be for future generations of artists.

I must say I cannot understand why I don't do
studies of the figure, seeing that it is often so
difficult for me to imagine the painting of the
future theoretically as anything other than a new
series of powerful portraitists, simple and
comprehensible to the general public. (To Emile
Bernard, circa Nov. 2, 1888. B19a)

And his vision of the portrait was centered on a new role for color:

I want to paint men and women with that something
of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and
which we seek to convey by the actual radiance and
vibration of our coloring.... Ah, the portrait, the
portrait with the thought and the soul of the model
in it, that is what I think must come. (To Theo,
September 3, 1888. LT531)

Often, he sought to express this through the use of complementary color; and he felt that the artist's sophisticated command of color for its own sake would enable him to attain new equivalents of abstract emotions and symbolic states.

Certainly, it had nothing to do with photography or with the delusive realism of Salon portraits.

Having been sent a photograph of his mother in October 1888, he felt forced to begin a portrait of her based on it, "because the black-and-white photograph annoys me so. Ah, what portraits could be made from nature with photography and painting! I always hope that we are still to have a great revolution in portraiture." (To Theo, circa October 9, 1888, LT548)

And his proselytizing campaign resulted in the periodic issue of mini-manifestoes, mostly directed at his twenty-year old colleague, Emile Bernard.

I want to do figures, figures and still more figures
(circa August 18, 1888. B15)

I strongly urge you to study portrait painting. Do
as many portraits as you can and don't flag. We
must win the public over later on by means of the
portraits; in my opinion it is the thing of the
future. (October 4, 1888. B19)

Yet he recognized the practical difficulties. First and foremost, the need for sympathetic and reliable models.

If I painted smoothly like Bouguereau, people would
not be ashamed to let themselves be painted, but I
think that I have lost models because they thought
that they were "badly done", because "it was only
pictures full of painting" that I did. The poor
little souls are afraid of being compromised and
that people will laugh at these portraits. (To Theo,
circa August 14, 1888. LT524)

He therefore needed friends to sit for him: Milliet the Zouave, Roulin the postman, Boch the artist-poet. In early August 1888, he painted the head of Roulin in a single sitting (fig. 1).

That's what I'm good at, doing a fellow roughly
in one sitting. If I wanted to show off, my dear
brother, I'd always do it - drink with the first
comer, paint him, not in watercolors but in oils,
on the spot in the manner of Daumier. (To Theo,
August 15, 1888. LT525)

Later, in early December 1888, he was able to inform Theo:

I have made portraits of a whole family, that of the
postman whose head I had done previously - the man,
his wife, the baby, the little boy, and the son of
sixteen [fig. 2], all characters and very French, though
the first has the look of a Russian. Size 15 canvases.
You know how I feel about this, how I feel in my
element, and that it consoles me up to a point for
not being a doctor. (To Theo, circa December 4, 1888.
LT560)

There was another family in Arles that van Gogh also painted: the Ginoux, proprietors of the Café de la Gare, setting for the famous Night Café (Yale University Art Gallery), where he stayed from May to September 1888 before moving into the Yellow House. He told Theo of his portrait of Mme Ginoux (fig. 3), painted in early November 1888 with Gauguin by his side assuring the sitter that one day she would be in the Louvre. She is! (or to be precise, in the Musée d'Orsay).

I have an Arlésienne at last, a figure (size 30
canvas) slashed on in an hour, background pale
citron, the face gray, the clothes black, black,
black, with perfectly raw Prussian blue.
(To Theo, circa Nov. 6, 1888 LT559)

But van Gogh also painted her husband, Joseph Michel Ginoux in a portrait whose real identity has been 'masked' for a century (fig. 4). The dramatic presentation - seen slightly from below, as if we were spectators looking up at him on stage - has led to the painting being called Portrait of an Actor. Van Gogh gave no report on this portrait, but one can assume that it too was finished in one short sitting. The brushstrokes are swift and sure, searching and defining form and surface, flesh and costume; while the background has an almost incandescent quality, created, one suspects, by an artificial light source.

It is within the context of the Ginoux family that the unnamed Jeune homme à la casquette should be placed. First, there is a family resemblance. The Ginoux were childless (unlike the productive Roulins). But the young man, probably aged sixteen or seventeen, seems to share some of the physiognomic characteristics of M. Ginoux. Was he perhaps a nephew? Secondly, the two paintings are stylistically close: comparable areas of flat color, lack of any concern of a Bougeureau-like finish, strong enclosing contours of an almost cloisonnist insistence. The brilliant slash of cobalt blue creates the peak of the cap; the line of prussian blue that descends from his right ear in a single plane actually passes through three different planes, and also abandons its primary duty as defining contour to the face, swerving instead to the left and dropping uninterruptedly into the neck.

There are further audacities, not least the angular shape of light on his neck, whose harshness suggest an artificial light-source that could be identified as the gas light that van Gogh had had specially installed in the Yellow House just before Gauguin's arrival on October 23, so that they could continue working on dark winter evenings. (The same gas-light effect may account for the 'incandescent' background to the Ginoux portrait.)

Nor should the ultimate audacity be overlooked. Van Gogh simply left the canvas untouched in order to 'create' the young man's shirt, a striking example of truth to material--linen to linen.

Prototypes for both portraits, especially in their stark presentation - frontal, direct, without props or fuss, without hands - go back to van Gogh's series of heads, both male and female, that he painted in Nuenen in 1885 as exercises around the Potato Eaters. One in particular (fig. 5) of a young Nuenen peasant provides a line of continuity in van Gogh's oeuvre.

Van Gogh's realisation of his painterly and coloristic aims did not prevent him from penetrating the sitter's character. The gamin that once was easing into adolescent bravura, a 'rougher' partner for the seemingly more suave image of the seventeen-year old Armand Roulin (fig. 2). Impassively nonchalant, perhaps even sullenly defiant, this concentrated image of early manhood has a distinctly 'modern' ring, whose palpable descendants in present-day Arles negate the very anonymity that still surrounds his true identity. The cap, slipped carelessly across his head with tufts of unruly hair sprouting from it, seems to suggest that incipient rebelliousness is not far behind the apparent unconcernedness. Certainly, it is no longer a schoolboy's cap, nor yet a uniform's attribute (neither soldier nor postman): it simply exists as an adolescent's freely chosen symbol.

The history of the painting can be traced back to Arles, from where it was sent to Theo in Paris in April 1889, among many other paintings before van Gogh went into voluntary confinement at the asylum at Saint-Rémy. Confirmation that the portrait was in Paris with Theo's family exists. After Theo's death in January 1891, his widow Johanna and her brother Andries Bonger compiled a hand-written list of van Gogh's paintings that Theo had left. No. 107 reads: "Portrait de Garçon" ("de Garçon" being added), with the French canvas size '8' indicated (that is 46 x 38 cm.). There can only be one candidate: the present portrait.

Moreover, it stayed in Johanna van Gogh-Bonger's collection until 1912, when she sold it from the famous Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne to the German collector Gottlieb Friedrich Reber of Barmen. Reber was an enthusiastic collector not only of Van Gogh, but of Cézanne (he owned The Boy in the Red Waistcoat, now in the Bührle Foundation at Zurich) and the Cubists.

The portrait was first exhibited in Amsterdam in the mammoth retrospective (474 items) held at the Stedelijk Museum in 1905. Between 1906 and 1912, Johanna frequently lent the painting to exhibitions in Germany, often in collaboration with the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer; but only once to Paris in the large exhibition arranged by Felix Fénéon for the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in 1908. The young German Expressionists, whether in Munich or Dresden or Berlin, must certainly have looked at the portrait with more than passing interest. And Matisse could have reflected upon it, had he seen it in Paris in 1908, repeating what Dr. Gachet said to van Gogh in front of his Arlésienne: "How difficult it is to be simple."

LETTERS

CL The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh, 3 vols. Introduction V.W. van Gogh. Preface and Memoir by J. van Gogh-Bonger, London,
1958
LT Letters from Vincent to his brother Theo
B Letters from Vincent to Emile Bernard

We are grateful to Ronald Pickvance for his assistance with this catalogue entry.


(fig. 1) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait de Joseph Roulin, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter B. Ford gift to Detroit Institute of Arts

(fig. 2) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait d'Armand Roulin, Museum Folkwang, Essen

(fig. 3) Vincent van Gogh, L'Arlésiene: Mme. Ginoux, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

(fig. 4) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait d'un acteur, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo

(fig. 5) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait d'un Paysant, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City