I want my Mommy

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother

Arles, October 1888

Oil on canvas 40.5x32.5cm

Pasadena California

Norton Simon Museum of Art

I am sure this smiling face is from a photograph; her public mask. Very few depictions of people in this period are smiling, not just Vincent’s portraits but even studio photos a smile was rare. Who could hold a smile posing long enough to paint it. Even photographs, which took a long time to take, are seldom of smiles in this period.

      Does he see his mother as a mysterious Mona Lisa la Giaconda? This is not the mystic smile that barely ripples Mona Lisa face. This is a very proper ministers wife, from an artistic Dutch family. She was disappointed with Vincent. She burned most of his early work. She removed it from boxes where it was stored piled it into a heap in the yard and burned it all. She was hoping he would forget about it and move on to a real job, as any other eldest Dutch son would. If he did not go into the ministry then perhaps he would work in the Goupil Galleries; ‘uncle Cent’ was a partner. She had to deal with children, who died in infancy, and at least three of her children died of suicide, I do not include Vincent into that number, as I’m not convinced that it was a suicide. The incompetence and wildness of Vincent may have been too much for her neat, everything in its place Dutch world.

     Still she smiles her prim little smile looking away from the viewer so as not to have the eye contact so ubiquitous in Vincent’s portraits. The eerie green background intensifies her mourning black buttoned up puritan dress.   

    There she is the artist’s mother, through the artist’s eyes.