That gardener who is actually a farmer: Van Gogh's "Italian" masterpiece

There are precise reasons why there are only three works by Vincent van Gogh in Italian public collections: the Gardener and theArlesian in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, and the Breton Women in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. One of these reasons is the little interest Van Gogh’s output aroused among Italian critics, for whom, in 1910, the Dutch artist was still an unknown or little more. Among the few Italian critics who had appreciated his work was the Apulian Ricciotto Canudo, a poet and film critic who was the Paris correspondent of the Sienese magazine Vita d’Arte: in 1908, in one of his articles, he had called Van Gogh “the greatest modern colorist,” including him in the “triad of the great New Primitives, with Cézanne and Gauguin,” who “do not copy man but affirm in every one of their engraved wood, in every painted sign, the idea-man, with naive and moving pride.”

It took the intelligence of a Macchiaioli painter, Gustavo Sforni, who was also a great collector, for Italy, in that 1910 referred to earlier, to see a work by Van Gogh live for the first time. In February of that year, Sforni, a far-sighted and wealthy 22-year-old, had managed to leave for Paris, accompanied by Ardengo Soffici, who had already been to the French capital years before and knew its market well: the purpose of the trip was to make a tour of the galleries in search of the most interesting new works, a tour that would lead the two to Paul Rosenberg’s studio, where Sforni was able to find and purchase Vincent van Gogh’s Peasant. Soffici’s judgment, however, would not be positive, nor could it have been otherwise: his downgrading of the Dutchman fits into the framework of a critical orientation tending to identify in Cézanne a leader of the school to which Soffici himself also traced the painting of Van Gogh, who in his opinion was, with Gauguin, nothing more than an admirer and disciple of Cézanne: “instead of advancing in the new path that the latter had traced,” Van Gogh and Gauguin, according to Soffici, “had to exaggerate the defects of his work-as always happens in imile cases-and betray the ideal he held dear.”

Vincent van Gogh, Gardener (September 1889; oil on canvas, 61 x 50 cm; Rome, National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art)

The Florentine had precisely the Gardener in mind (a title, admittedly rather unfortunate, that would be assigned to the work later: at the time it was known as Peasant’s Head): Sforni had exhibited the canvas at the First Italian Exhibition of Impressionism, organized by Soffici himself at the Lyceum Club in Florence between April and May 1910. And while acknowledging Van Gogh’s talent “and perhaps a spark of genius,” Soffici wrote that he “failed him in reason, when perhaps the maturity of years would have led him to a simpler understanding of nature.” And again, Soffici wrote, "even so, there is no lack of merit in Vincent van Gogh’s Peasant’s Head . But it is difficult, when one has understood and loved the genuine, wholesome and frank art of a Renoir, a Degas, a Cézanne, not to remain dissatisfied in front of works like this one, which portrays about the merits and shortcomings of all those of the Dutch painter, and reveals, instead of a sincere artist’s temperament, a bistort will, grappling with rebellious and invincible matter."

Van Gogh’s primitivism, and the authenticity, at the time seen almost as savage, of that “very strange artist who died of discontent,” as Canudo had called him, were, however, the traits of his personality that had most fascinated Sforni, who would, moreover, travel to Provence in 1913 to see Van Gogh’s sites. The Gardener is one of the portraits that the artist executed during his period of treatment at the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence mental hospital, and the formal elements that distinguish it are those typical of the most tormented moment of his existence: the brushstroke is mellow, textural and fragmented, at times characterized by great spontaneity, as is the case in the stripes of the shirt, at other times more meticulous, with short lines that along the juxtapositions of complementary colors constantly change direction, vertically, horizontally, obliquely, to follow the curves of the landscape elements. In the center is a young man portrayed half-length, with an unusual naturalism: he has recently been identified as a certain Jean Barral, a farmer who worked by the day in Saint-Rémy. In the background, a vegetable garden makes the painting almost unique in Van Gogh’s production, since few are set portraits, and even fewer are portraits where the identification between subject and environment is as profound.

For Van Gogh it was a return to a theme that was always dear to him: the melancholy caused by his illness had reminded him of the period he spent in Brabant, even inspiring him to remake some of his paintings from that period, such as The Potato Eaters, although the artist later failed in his intention. Sjraar van Heugten, among his greatest scholars, has written that Van Gogh, a painter who was born in the countryside and to whom rural life was entirely familiar, succeeded in realizing his ambition to become a painter of peasant life: a peasant life that in his production is expressed not only through the suffering paintings of Nuenen, but which also emerges from his still lifes, his landscapes, and in this case also from the portrait of the Gardener who is not a gardener.

In the adverse circumstances of his hospitalization in Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh had found an opportunity to celebrate the perfect union between man and nature. On September 6, 1889, Vincent wrote his brother Theo a letter in which, in addition to making transparent to him his great desire to devote himself to the genre of portraiture (and the peasant dates precisely from the month of September), he told him about a painting of his that portrayed the figure of a reaper: “I saw in it the image of death, in the sense that humanity would be the grain being mowed [...]. But there is nothing sad about this death; it takes place in the full light of day, with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold.” It is with these considerations in mind that one must read the presence of the landscape behind the farmer, which begins to be tinged with the colors of autumn. To the vigorous young man who makes himself known to the relative corresponds, behind, the vegetable garden that will soon lose its lushness: the “cycle of life” that is central and omnipresent in Van Gogh’s peasant works, the alternation of the seasons in a continuous process of death and rebirth, invests here both the verdant field and the young villager, and in few other Van Gogh paintings is there such a sincere harmony, such full continuity, between nature and human being, which explodes into a kind of ’serene anxiety’ through the ruins of his twisted and nervous sign, capable of finding pose and relaxation only in the face of the peasant. Even in the Saint-Rémy period there are few other works that with such icastic immediacy express all that inner dissension that we get from the artist’s letters, and perhaps even more so from certain of his paintings: it is no accident that Giuliano Briganti considered the Gardener as Saint-Rémy’s masterpiece. Perhaps not without a hint of parochialism, given that this is the artist’s greatest ’Italian’ masterpiece: theArlesiana is a variant of a subject tackled and replicated many times, the Breton Women are a copy from Gauguin. The Gardener is , on the contrary, a unique and most precious painting, which Italy also risked losing several times: first during the Florence flood of ’66, from which it was saved thanks to the promptness of Sandra Verusio, wife of the then owner, lawyer Giovanni Verusio, Sforni’s uncle; then again in the 1980s when the work was put on the market and risked ending up abroad because the state, which had notified the painting in 1954, until 1988 did not move a finger to secure it for public collections, and finally in May 1998, three years after it entered the National Gallery, when it was stolen in one of the most bombastic art thefts in history, and then recovered just over a month later.

And now that the work finally seems to have found a pose, it might not be a bad idea to rethink the name by which it is presented to the public. Émile Bernard, in one of his letters, had referred to the canvas as Paysan provençal. It might be an idea.

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