THE ZOUAVE
By VINCENT VAN GOGH.
THE Zouave was, like VAN GOGH, a foreigner, whose occupation made France his country, but he remains an outsider. It is the portrait of a type, very true in rendering the simple watchfulness & confidence of the Arab.
The rigidity of the man of the lower classes in sitting for his picture, it has the native character of the Arab in the widely parted legs on the low seat. In this gay military costume a means of forgetting death & attracting the eyes of the unenrolled the colours have also, through the artist's arrangement, that symbolic expressiveness of which VAN GOGH speaks in his letters.
The animality of the dark head, still restrained in the red turban & in the dark blue jacket, bursts out in the fiery flaring trousers. The significant division of the picture is not of left and right, but of upper & lower halves.
The upper half is cool and sparse, with the figure contracted, stable, symmetrical, ornamented with perfectly legible detail, & set to one side of its space against a cold plastered wall enclosed by perpendicular bands of green.
The lower half is dominated by the shapeless, barbaric, vermilion trousers above a reddish ground, even more unstable through the network of its tiles & joints (a Japanese motif) diagonal streaks of the same family as the converging highlights & folds that slash the stronger red & clearly opposed to the curved ornament of the jacket.
There is in the immense spread of the trousers a kind of perspective which gives to the contrast of the lower & upper parts the value of a passage from the intensity of the near to the more subdued quality of what is beyond.
The feet take part in this perspective of the figure, adding by their divergence to the complexity of the pattern of the floor.
Here should be mentioned the adroit recurrence of the white & green of the wall & sash in the tripod formed by the shoes & the leg of the stool, an example of VAN GOGH'S inventiveness in uniting the two sharply opposed halves of the work through common features of colour & line.
It is a brilliant, original work both in colour & in the ingenious construction of shifting contrasted symmetries from part to part.
VINCENT VAN GOGH PAINTINGS.
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