Judy Sund: "The Essence of Earthiness: Van Gogh's Peasants"

Judy Sund of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York presents: Van Gogh's Peasants: The Essence of Earthiness. Van Gogh's portraits of Patience Escalier, one of which will be on loan to the Frick this fall, were part of his long-term project to capture the essence of the peasant. Inspired by literary descriptions as well as by the art of the past, he was intent on giving definitive form to a well-established type. Abandoning strict accuracy in favor of evocative color and texture, van Gogh aimed to convey a sense of the agrarian laborer's life on the land and to capture something "truer than the literal truth."