Van Gogh - Portraits et Autoportraits

Description

For Van Gogh, portraiture was far more than a pictorial genre: it was a trial, an encounter, a way of probing the human soul and measuring his art against that of the masters who came before him. From the age of twenty, even before choosing the path of an artist, he sensed its power in the museums of Europe. Yet where Rembrandt immortalized the powerful, Van Gogh turned his gaze towards the unseen: peasants, workers, women and men without renown, whose faces bear the marks of weariness, dignity, solitude, or hope. In this book, Pascal Bonafoux follows this quest with rare attentiveness, accompanying the artist from his northern years to the radiance of Arles, and finally to the last days in Auvers-sur-Oise. Through portraits and self-portraits, an inner as well as pictorial journey emerges: that of a man seeking, in every face, a human truth, and in his own gaze, the fleeting trace of his identity.