French girl immortalised in Le portrait d’Adeline Ravoux (The Portrait of Adeline Ravoux), a painting made by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh in June 1890 a month before his suicide.
Adeline Ravoux was the daughter of a wine merchant, Arthur-Gustave Ravoux and his wife, Adeline (née Touillet). Van Gogh rented a room at their inn when he lived in Auvers-sur-Oise. He moved there on his return from the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence hospice where he had been admitted, at his request, a year earlier.
Twelve-year-old Adeline sat for three paintings. Van Gogh depicts her, rather than a photographic resemblance, with “impassioned aspects” of contemporary life through the “modern taste for color.” Van Gogh wrote to his brother: “Last week I did a portrait of a girl about sixteen, in blue against a blue background, the daughter of the people with whom I am staying. I have given her this portrait, but I made a variation of it for you, a size 15 canvas.”
Adeline Ravoux was asked sixty-six years later what she remembered of Van Gogh. Before he painted her portrait, Van Gogh had only made polite exchanges of conversation with Adeline. One day, though, he asked her if she would be pleased if he were to do her portrait. After obtaining her parents permission, she sat one afternoon in which he completed the painting. He smoked continually on his pipe as he worked, and thanked her for sitting very still. She was very proud to sit for the painting she described as a “symphony in blue”. Van Gogh thought she was sixteen, but she was twelve and a half. Adeline sat just once, but three paintings were made of her.
For the sitting, Adeline was dressed in a blue dress, the background was blue and her hair ribbon was blue. Van Gogh made a copy of the original painting for his brother, with slightly different shades of blue. In a slightly different pose or aspect, Adeline appears against a background of roses, portions of a still life of roses that he completed just a few days prior to this painting. This painting is owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Despite his love of his new surroundings at the inn and his feverish painting activity, on the morning of 27 July 1890, Van Gogh walked into a field and shot himself in the chest. The bullet was deflected by a rib and lodged in his stomach. He survived the impact and managed to walk back to the inn. Adeline Ravoux later recalled that Van Gogh admitted to her father, “I have tried to kill myself.” Two days later at the inn Vincent succumbed to his wounds in the presence of his brother Theo van Gogh.
Neither Adeline nor her parents appreciated Van Gogh’s style and were disappointed that it was not true to life. Yet, even though Adeline was a young girl at the time, pictures of her as a young woman showed that van Gogh painted her as she would become.
Adeline Ravoux wrote a memoir, “Souvenirs sur le séjour de Vincent van Gogh à Auvers-sur-Oise” (Memories of Vincent van Gogh’s stay in Auvers-sur-Oise) published in Les Cahiers de Van Gogh (1957). She died on 3 May 1965 at age 87. In 2010, the painting inspired Marie Sellier to write a novel, Journal d’Adeline: un été avec Van Gogh (The Diary of Adeline: A Summer with Van Gogh).
Link to Wikipedia biography