After having documented the painter's 15 months of Arlesian life in Van Gogh's EarBernadette Murphy looked at her models. Revelations about their identity and their destinies to be discovered in Van Gogh's cafe.
How did you go about identifying 12 portraits of Arlesians, previously anonymous, painted by Vincent van Gogh?
It's a long, painstaking job. When I opened my first book on Van Gogh, even before writing about him, it was full of errors. For me, the only way to demonstrate this was to act like a detective and I got into the game. I created a database of all the people who lived in Arles at the time of Van Gogh: 13 310 people lived in the town in 1888. Today I am at 25,000 because I have since added ancestors, descendants and all those who may have been in contact with him during his stay. Then the methodology was to eliminate who it couldn't be. We already knew, for example, the name of Joseph Ginoux, the husband of The Arlesianbut there were six namesakes, all from the same family. I had to search through the civil status documents and double-check everything. It's like a big puzzle where you have to find all the pieces.
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