L’Arlésienne: Madame Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Marie Julien, 1848–1911)

While in Arles, Van Gogh painted two very similar portraits of Marie Ginoux, the proprietress of the Café de la Gare, wearing the regional costume of the legendary dark-haired beauties of Arles. The first version, which he described in a letter of November 1888 as “an Arlésienne . . . knocked off in one hour,” must be the more thinly and summarily executed portrait in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. In it a parasol and gloves lie on the table instead of books. This portrait belonged to the sitter until she sold it in 1895.