In this portrait, with which the shopkeeper never parted, the pure colours, the use of contrasting complementary colours, and the flat picture space are all inspired by Japanese art. Here, Van Gogh could find paintings by Sezanne, Neo-Impressionists, and other Avant-garde artists. He was affectionately called "Père Tanguy" by artists and Van Gogh valued his friendship enormously.Īt Tanguy’s shop the avant-garde met and artists could see sort of a latest art that was not accepted anywhere else. Julien-François Tanguy (1825−94) ran a small paint supplies shop in Montmartre and often took art works in exchange for the goods he sold. Père Tanguy was rather important figure for Vincent van Gogh and other artists at the time. His colors are brighter and contrasts are more enhanced compared to the original piece.Ībove: Vincent van Gogh, "Courtesan (After Eisen)," 1887. Van Gogh copied and enlarged the figure by Kesai Eisen, tracing on a grid, giving her a colorful kimono and placing her against a bright yellow background. Not accidentally did Vincent choose the animals for the frame: in 19th century France, prostitutes were often referred to as grues (cranes) or grenouilles (frogs) so, here we see depictions of animal metaphors referring to the woman’s profession. Similarly to the other copies he made, he gave this piece a border around the figure with motifs from other Japanese prints: the watery landscape with bamboo canes, water lilies, frogs, cranes and, in the distance, a little boat. In 1887, Van Gogh traced in pencil and ink the cover of an issue of the magazine Paris Illustré devoted to Japan and afterwards made a large-scale oil painting in the same fashion "Courtesan (After Eisen)," based on a piece by Japanese artist Kesai Eisen. And even though he duplicated imagery of the prints, his every brush stroke added something of his own, regards Jonathan Jones, the art-critic of the Guardian. To make them look more exotic, he added sort of a border of arbitrary characters borrowed from other Japanese prints, because, of course, he did not know a word in Japanese. About 500 of them survive, and are now part of the Van Gogh Museum’s permanent collection.Īt first, van Gogh just copied the works, making pencil sketches and oil paintings after Japanese masters (see two of them after Utagawa Hiroshige above). Bakker, one of the exhibition’s four curators, said that van Gogh originally held an exhibition trying to resell the prints, but it wasn’t successful, and instead he hung onto them, tacked them to the walls of his studio and used them for inspiration. So, he and his brother immediately bought about 660 prints for just a few cents a piece. A year later, when the artist moved into his brother’s apartment in Paris, he discovered that the German art dealer Siegfried Bing sold Japanese artworks and decorative objects at very reasonable prices in the Bing Gallery next to the place where Van Goghs dwelled. Having bought first stack of prints in Antwerp, van Gogh was fascinated by them studied them very carefully. Vincent became one of the most avid lovers and collectors of ukiyo-e prints or Japanese pictures of the floating world, as well as of Japanese albums created for export. "Well, these docks are one huge Japonaiserie, fantastic, singular, strange." he wrote to his brother Theo. Van Gogh first encountered Japanese prints in 1885 while living in Antwerp, whose docks he said were teeming with Japanese wares at the time.