Portrait of Doctor Gachet

Catalogue numbers: F 753, JH 2007.

In May 1890 van Gogh left the South of France and moved to a village forty miles outside Paris, Auvers. There he was very productive, painting over sixty pictures, and drawing a great deal before he wounded himself fatally and died on 29 July. Auvers had many connections with painters. Both Pissarro and Cézanne had worked there in the 1870s, and Dr Gachet, friend of Pissarro, amateur painter, and avid collector of modern French art, kept that link alive.

Van Gogh's portrait of the doctor is a curious one. He claimed that it was intended to convey the heart-broken expression of modern times. Indeed the pose, head on hand, is a traditional representation of melancholy. There are other symbols and emblems. The foxgloves are thought to be a reference to Gachet's practice as a homeopathic doctor. The inclusion of two novels (in this case by the de Goncourt brothers) is not without precedent in van Gogh's portraiture. Both of these novels are about Paris; Manette Salomon is in fact about a Parisian artist and his model. Germinie Lacerteux was the story of the tragic life of a domestic servant who fell disastrously in love. For van Gogh, city life in general - and Paris in particular - was a place of melancholy and ill health. The country was its opposite, restorative and strengthening. The portrait of Gachet is an ambitious attempt to make a kind of historical portrait of modern man, suffering from the ill effects of urban life, from which there was no real escape but for which art could offer its unreal consolations.