Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier)

August 1888
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890)
Oil on canvas
Norton Simon Art Foundation

Sunburnt and weather-beaten, the Provençal peasant Patience Escalier gazes out of Van Gogh’s picture with blazing intensity. Dazzling yellow, vivid blue, green, and red make this portrait, painted in August 1888, perhaps the artist’s most daring coloristic experiment to date. “[I]nstead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, “I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself with force.” He called the picture “a sort of ‘man with a hoe,’” referring to a celebrated work by the previous generation’s great painter of peasants, Jean-François Millet: Man with a Hoe, today in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Van Gogh Comes to California

Portrait of a Peasant was acquired by Norton Simon in 1975––the same year the Norton Simon Museum was founded. For 50 years, this striking portrait of a provincial subject has been a major highlight of the collections. Today, it is the cornerstone of the Museum’s holdings of works by Van Gogh—which comprise six oil paintings, an early drawing, an etching and an autograph letter—making it the most extensive collection of the artist’s work in the western United States. In recent years, Patience Escalier has been exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay, the Frick Collection and the National Gallery, London, as part of the Museum’s loan exchange program, enabling the painting to be enjoyed by museumgoers around the world.