Poetry of the night: Eugène Boch

Van Gogh met the Belgian painter Eugène Boch (1855-1941) in June of 1888, through a mutual friend. Boch was staying in a small village very near to Arles and often visited Van Gogh in the yellow house. Van Gogh was struck by his distinctive appearance, with his sharp features and green eyes. The poet In August of that year Van Gogh conceived a plan to portray his friend. It was to become not merely a portrait, but a reflection of Boch's poetic, impassioned nature. For this reason Van Gogh titled the work 'The poet':

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I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is in his nature. He'll be a blond man. I want to put my appreciation, the love I have for him, into the picture. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.[...]
Behind the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, most intense blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination of the bright head against the rich blue background, I get a mysterious effect, like a stare into the depths of an azure sky.
From: letter to Theo van Gogh, 11 August 1888.

Stars: dreams and infinity The starry sky in the Portrait of Eugène Boch is intended by Van Gogh as a reference to dreams and infinity and as such to his own ideals: the eternal ties that exist between all artists and the unity of visual art and poetry. Van Gogh wanted to found an artists' colony in the yellow house in Arles, and the portrait of Boch gained a place in Van Gogh's bedroom there. Other paintings of stars in Van Gogh's oeuvre are The starry night, The starry night over the Rhône, Country road in Provence by night.

In September 1888 Van Gogh wrote to his sister Wil on painting a starry sky:

'If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are citron-yellow, others have a pink glow, or a green blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without me expatiating on this theme it will be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.