Eugene Boch

Title

Eugene Boch

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

"Eugène Boch"

Artist: Vincent van Gogh

Title: Eugène Boch

Location Created: Arles, France; September, 1888

Object Type: Painting

Genre: Portrait at bust length

Date: 1888

Style: Nineteenth-Century European Painting Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Height: 600 mm (23.62 in); Width: 450 mm (17.71 in)

Object History: Bequest of M. Eugène Boch through the Société des amis du Musée du Louvre, 1941

Collection: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. He was not commercially successful, and his suicide at 37 came after years of mental illness, depression and poverty.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet, and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept a long correspondence by letter.

Eugène Boch

Van Gogh met the Belgian painter Eugène Boch (1855-1941) in mid-June 1888, while Boch was spending a few weeks near Arles. Around 8 July, Vincent mentioned Boch in a letter to his brother Théo: "I very much like the looks of this young man with his distinctive face, like a razor blade, and his green eyes".

On 11 August, his idea began to take shape: "I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works like the nightingale sings, because it is his nature to do so. This man will be blond. I would like to convey in the picture my appreciation, the love that I have for him. So I will paint him just as he is, as faithfully as I can [...].

Behind his head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of this shabby appartment, I will paint infinity, I will do a simple background of the richest blue, the most intense blue that I can create, and through this simple combination of the bright head against this rich, blue background, I will obtain a mysterious effect, like a star in the depths of an azure sky".

Two weeks later, Boch sat for Van Gogh. "Well, thanks to him I have at last the first sketch of this painting that I have dreamt of for so long – The Poet. He sat for me. His fine head with his green eyes stands out in my portrait against a starry sky of deep ultramarine; he wears a short, yellow jacket, a collar of unbleached linen and a colourful tie".

Although he only considered it to be a "sketch", Van Gogh framed this work, which he called The Poet. We know that it hung for some time on the wall of his bedroom in the Yellow House, because it appears in the first version of The Bedroom (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum).

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture, Musée d'Orsay

This is a Google Art Project image, thank you Google!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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June 17th, 2020

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