Courtesan (after Eisen)
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · October to November 1887
A Japanese courtesan in a magnificent patterned kimono stands against a bright yellow background, and around her Vincent has painted a frame of water, bamboo, frogs, cranes and a small boat. The figure is copied from a woodblock print by Keisai Eisen that had been reproduced on the cover of the magazine Paris Illustre in May 1886, in an issue devoted to Japan. Vincent traced the cover, enlarged it and turned it into an oil painting, one of three such Japonaiseries he made in Paris in the autumn of 1887.
The kimono is the heart of the picture, and he painted its pattern with obvious pleasure in reds, blues, greens and gold, outlining every fold in dark paint. The yellow ground around the figure is flat and glowing, and the water and creatures of the border are taken from other prints in the collection he and Theo were building, which now numbers several hundred sheets. Look for the frogs at the bottom and the cranes at the top. In French slang of the time, both words were nicknames for prostitutes, so the border is a sly comment on the woman in the middle.
Vincent believed that Japanese art was the key to a new way of seeing: bright, flat, decorative, and full of feeling for nature. He said that in the south of France he hoped to live like a Japanese painter, and the pictures of Arles that follow in the museum are the result. The Japanese prints from his own collection hang nearby, so you can compare the source and the copy. The painting is in a slightly unusual medium, oil on cotton rather than linen, because he could not always afford proper canvas in Paris.
Did You Know? The frogs and cranes in the border are a joke: in Paris slang of the 1880s both words meant a prostitute, like the courtesan in the centre.
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