Adeline Ravoux

Adeline Ravoux (June 1890) is a series of three oil portraits by Vincent van Gogh, depicting the twelve-year-old daughter of his innkeeper at Auvers-sur-Oise, produced in approximately one week in mid-June 1890 — barely six weeks before Van Gogh's death. The primary version, held in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Bequest of Leonard C. Hanna Jr., 1958), measures 50.2 × 50.5 cm and is organized entirely around a pervading, jewel-like blue — blue background, blue dress, blue shadows on the face — that Adeline herself later described as "a Symphony in Blue." Van Gogh gave one version to the Ravoux family, kept or sent another to Theo, and produced the third as an independent compositional variant. Adeline was not pleased with the portrait, finding it unlike her; a photograph of her in old age confirms with striking force that it captured her with extraordinary fidelity across time. She later recorded a memoir of Van Gogh's stay that includes her account of witnessing his return to the inn after the fatal shooting of 27 July 1890. The painting combines the near-profile severity of Italian Renaissance portraiture with the radical chromatic immersion of Van Gogh's late Auvers style to produce one of the most formally concentrated and emotionally resonant portraits of the nineteenth century — a work in which blue becomes not merely a color but the entire emotional and spiritual content of an image, the "impassioned aspects" of a contemporary life expressed, as Van Gogh insisted all true portraiture must express them, through the "modern taste for color."