Tricolour Eyes - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (VII)

Look closely at the eyes of Van Gogh’s portrait of the Arles gardener Patience Escalier. Do you discern a hint of the tricolour flag in there? I certainly do, and more so when you’re in front of the actual portrait. It’s a truth that is not always obvious, that even the best camera phones or online reproductions can distort and shift the true colour of a painting.

Van Gogh, Portrait of a Peasant (1888)

No matter, even in reproduction, the extraordinary Portrait of a Peasant flashes spectacularly onto your retinas. There’s something very unusual about the choice of colours. You can spend a good twenty minutes just taking in that wonderful, almost luminous, green stubble that give the gardener an otherworldly glow. And that complexion: as Van Gogh wrote, a product of ‘the very furnace of harvest time, deep in the south’. But it’s those eyes that you return to over and over again. 

Van Gogh, detail from Portrait of a Peasant

Indeed, as I stood in front of the painting, the tricolour observation struck me as quite deliberate. Was this a signal from the Dutchman that here, before us, was the essence of a Frenchman? The challenging stare of Patience Escalier - incidentally, what a fantastic name - certainly seems to declare that, throwing out a proud patriotism which brooks no argument.