"The Essence of Earthiness: Van Gogh's Peasants," by Judy Sund, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

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.”