The Gardener, also known as Portrait of a Young Peasant or Provençal Peasant, is an oil-on-canvas painting by Vincent van Gogh, dated of September 1889 and held in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, in Rome.
The painting, considered the most important by the Dutch painter among those in Italian public collections, is a masterpiece of Van Gogh's Provençal period and shows some of the fundamental themes of his painting, such as the use of the portrait, the relationship with nature and the combination of primary and complementary colors.
Title and cataloging of the work Van Gogh, unusually, does not mention The Gardener in any of his letters and therefore does not give it any title. In any case, the canvas has always belonged to the catalog raisonné of Van Gogh's works. It first appeared in the catalog drawn up in 1928—revised in 1970—by Jacob-Baart de la Faille, entitled "The work of Vincent Van Gogh", which numbered the painting as 531. It was then included in the catalog "The complete van Gogh" (1980) by Jan Hulsker, who gave The Gardener the number 1779. In order to differentiate between the two cataloging systems, the critics associate the initials of the authors of the catalogs with the numbers of the different paintings. Therefore, The Gardener is, respectively, F531 and JH1779, depending on the cataloging system referred to. In the collection of the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, the canvas is cataloged under inventory number 8638.
Although the work is often known by the title The Gardener, this is in fact a fairly recent title, which does not fully express the theme or message of the work. It is a title probably inspired by the background of the painting which, rather than recalling a cultivated field, resembles a garden. Instead, other hypotheses hold that the title derives from the possibility that it is the portrait of the gardener of the psychiatric hospital of Saint Rémy, where Vincent van Gogh was a patient between April 1889 and May 1890.
Van Gogh's friend Émile Bernard, in his letters written in 1911, gave it the title Paysan provençal (English: Provençal peasant), while at the first exhibition of the impressionists, organized at the Lyceum in Florence in 1910, it was presented as Peasant's head. More generally, in the cataloging of Van Gogh's works it is identified as Peasant or as Portrait of a Young Peasant, while in the collection of the Roman museum the title The Gardener (Provençal Peasant) has prevailed.
History
Van Gogh painted the canvas in September 1889 while residing at the hospital in Saint Rémy. The dating of the month of execution is approximate—although today almost all critics accept it as valid—because Van Gogh does not mention the work in the numerous letters he wrote to his brother Theo and friends.
At first, in fact, it was considered to be part of the body of work that Van Gogh painted in Arles, a period from February 1888 to March 1889. Subsequently, it was believed to be a work from the period spent in Saint Rémy (April 1889 – April 1890). Finally, Hulsker's studies placed the work in September 1889, a period when the painter was being treated at the Saint Paul de Mausole hospital in Saint Rémy, linking it to the painter's strong interest in portraits during that period. In early September, Van Gogh, after a serious nervous breakdown and a period of inactivity, returned to painting with great commitment and he wrote to his brother Theo:
After the painter's death, the work entered the collectors' market until it reached the Parisian gallery of Paul Rosemberg, where it was bought in 1910 by Gustavo Sforni, intellectual and macchiaioli painter who in the early 20th century brought to Florence, the city where he lived, several works of art of modern painting: among them were the Portrait of Monsieur Chocquet (1889) by Paul Cézanne, two oil paintings by Maurice Utrillo and a pastel painting by Edgar Degas. After its arrival in Italy, The Gardener was loaned for the Italian exhibition dedicated to the impressionists organized by the writer and painter Ardengo Soffici between April and May 1910 in the halls of the Lyceum Club in Florence.. The exhibition bore the name "Prima mostra italiana dell'impressionismo". The canvas, exhibited under number 71, was presented alongside works by Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Jean-Louis Forain, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and eighteen sculptures by Medardo Rosso. That same year, Soffici gave a not very positive opinion on The Gardener, since in Van Gogh's work he observed a break with the lessons of Cézanne, an artist he held in high esteem:
After the temporary exhibition, the work returned to the hands of its owner, Sforni. The latter, after the criticism of the Florence exhibition, thought that his contemporaries would criticize the work if he put it on display in Italy, so he jealously guarded it in his own home, allowing it to be seen only by his friends and intellectuals who, like him, were attentive to the new foreign trends and the innovations of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.
After the death of the collector in 1940, his lawyer uncle Giovanni Verusio inherited the painting along with his entire collection which, in addition to the aforementioned French authors, included the works of Fattori—more than forty in total, including oil paintings and drawings—Signorini and Severini. Although Van Gogh had not yet reached the popularity that the art market brought him in the 1980s, the painting was already recognized as the most precious and valuable piece in that collection, so that during the end of World War II Verusio, who had taken refuge in a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, hid it in a wooden box under the straw of a lemon tree greenhouse in Pian dei Giullari to protect it from looting by German soldiers.
After the war, in 1945, it was exhibited at the Pitti Palace, in the exhibition of French painting organized by Berenson entitled "La peinture française à Florence". It was also exhibited in 1952, in the retrospective exhibition organized by Lamberto Vitali at the Royal Palace in Milan with the title "Vincent Van Gogh". The work began to gain importance in the national territory and in 1954 the Italian State declared the painting a work of historical and artistic interest.
In 1966, the lawyer's wife, Sandra Verusio, brought the canvas to safety during the flood of florence by taking it to Rome. There the canvas remained in the dining room of the house for about ten years—though often replaced by a copy. The possession of the painting allowed the family to enter the salons of high society and to interact with the great personalities of their time thanks to the numerous requests that the Verusio couple received to be able to admire the Van Gogh. Figures of the artistic world such as Renato Guttuso and the art critic Giuliano Briganti passed by, as well as other important personalities from different fields: for example, the lawyer Agnelli came to the Verusio family home on several occasions to admire the canvas. The painting's fame, however, inevitably led to several theft attempts. Mrs. Verusio, speaking of the thieves, said in 1998 during an interview:
Tired of this situation, the lawyer Verusio decided to sell the canvas, which was acquired in 1977 for the figure of 600 million liras, well below the price of the painting at the time, which was estimated at least 1.2 billion. It was bought by the Roman gallery owner Silvestro Pierangeli, since the Italian State at that time did not exercise its right of pre-emption. What actually happened is that Pietrangeli acted as an intermediary for an anonymous buyer, who, as it was discovered in 1983, was the Swiss gallery owner Ernst Beyeler. The Italian State mobilized only in 1988, at the height of the impressionist collecting market, when Beyeler announced that he was going to sell the work to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice for the sum of fourteen billion lire. In that operation it was shown that during the first negotiation, Beyeler did not turn out to be the real buyer, since in the minutes of sale the name registered was that of Pierangeli.
Thus, in 1989 the Italian State demanded to practice its right of pre-emption and repurchased the painting, reimbursing Beyeler the same amount he had paid in 1977: 600 million lire. Beyeler considered that the figure was too far below the market price—if the State had not repurchased the painting, the Guggenheim Museum would have paid it 25 times more—and sued the Italian State. After losing all the lawsuits initiated in Italy, he appealed to the European Court of European Rights in Strasbourg. Meanwhile, in 1995, the painting was transferred to Rome and the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, where it was placed next to the other Van Gogh painting owned by the Gallery, L'arlésienne (Madame Ginoux).
In 2000, the European court ruled for the first time: it affirmed that the Italian State had a right of pre-emption but considered that it had exercised its right too late and had paid too low a price, so that it had enjoyed an "unjustified enrichment". The trial on who should be the true owner of the work ended in May 2002, after more than a quarter of a century, when the judges of Strasbourg recognized the Italian State its legitimate possession and ownership of the work. Consequently, The Gardener officially and de jure entered the collection of the Roman museum. The judges awarded Beyeler a compensation of one million three hundred thousand euros plus fifty-five thousand euros reimbursement for the costs of the process. Giuliano Urbani, the then Minister of Cultural Heritage, expressed his great satisfaction with regard to the sentence:
Theft of the painting and subsequent recovery (1998)
Between the night of May 19 and 20, 1998, the painting earned a space on all the front pages of the newspapers because it was the object of a robbery at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. In addition to The Gardener, the thieves took L'arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), also painted by Van Gogh in 1890, and Le Cabanon de Jourdan, a work by Paul Cézanne (1906). The robbery was perpetrated by three armed, barefoot, balaclava-wearing thieves who waited inside the premises until the museum closed.
The robbers bound, gagged and threatened the guards at gunpoint. The museum waiter noticed that the entrance was still open, so he alerted the carabinieri, who came and released the guards. The theft had a strong media impact because of the fame of Van Gogh and Cézanne and the estimated value of the works; in such a way that it was compared to preceding thefts such as that of Caravaggio's Nativity, stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, and Gustav Klimt's Portrait of a Lady, stolen the previous year from the Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in Piacenza and recovered in 2019.
Unlike the Palermo theft, that has not been recovered as of 2022, the three Rome canvases were recovered forty-six days later. Police arrested eight people for the theft. The Italian-Belgian leader of the gang of thieves, Eneo Ximenes, commented upon being arrested:
In the period between the theft and the recovery, the paintings had been taken to Turin to be sold to a buyer. The latter had backed out at the last moment because of the media tension that the event had raised and did not want to buy it despite a significant discount on the sale offered by the thieves, who had initially negotiated the operation with a price starting at fifteen to twenty billion lire. Francesco Pellegrino reconstructed the theft of the works by Van Gogh and Cézanne in the volume Ore 22, furto in galleria, edited by Natyvi Contemporanea in 2013 and prefaced by Walter Veltroni, who was the Minister of Cultural Heritage at the time of the theft.
Description and style