To Vincent and his peers, Paris was the quintessential modern city. He also tried to sell some of his paintings for 50 francs each, through several different dealers, but to little avail. But in Paris (which he’d already visited in 18), he was exchanging paintings left and right, and becoming fast friends with new artists. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).Īntwerp had dashed Vincent’s hopes of selling his work. Plaster Cast of a Woman’s Torso (Paris, February–March 1887). It took on new life after Vincent’s experiments, and then, after Cézanne’s practice, with artists like Matisse and Picasso at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tradition of inserting casts or statuettes into larger paintings has been alive and well since the Renaissance. These seem to have predated some of Cézanne’s similar experiments, such as his L’Amour en Plâtre (1895), now at the Courtauld in London. He owned a few small casts of ancient Venus figurines, which led to sketches, drawings, and eventually to sublime still lifes-like Still Life with Plaster Statuette, a Rose and Two Novels and Plaster Cast of a Woman’s Torso. He also used casts while working at home in Paris. He’d failed to work with live models or find women who would pose naked, so he’d settled for gypsum casts-a common practice in the academies. His three months in Antwerp had been miserable, economically and physically. But Vincent hadn’t moved to Paris to join the impressionists. Now, he told his friend that he wasn’t “one of the club” but that he admired Degas’s nude figures and Monet’s landscapes. In Antwerp, he hadn’t known about the impressionists. In this first letter, Vincent talked about his new landscape studies, “frankly green, frankly blue.” He said that since life is found in color, “true drawing is modeling with color.” He reiterated his respect for all-stars like Delacroix and mentioned artists he’d never heard of before-peers or people not much older than himself. The letter, which sold at auction in 1995 and is in a private collection, is a rare testament to Vincent’s time in Paris: only ten letters document the two years he spent there. He was writing to Horace Mann Livens, a young English painter he’d met at the Academy in Antwerp while practicing on gypsum casts of ancient sculptures. Vincent Van Gogh had arrived in Paris in late February 1886. There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even-the French air clears up the brain and does good-a world of good.” “And mind my dear fellow, Paris is Paris.

Don ellis artist