# Portrait of a Woman with Red Ribbon [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [GOGH, Vincent van]() - Date: 1851-1900 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm ## Commentary <a href="\#" onClick="w=window.open \('/database/glossary/note02.html', 'newWin', 'scrollbars=yes,status=no,dependent=yes,screenX=0,screenY=0,width=300,height=400'\);w.opener=this;w.focus\(\);return false">Catalogue numbers:</a> F 207, JH 979. Conscious of his failure in the field of rural genre, van Gogh decided to return to the city. He planned to go to Paris in the hope that the new movements in Parisian painting, of which he had heard from his brother, might provide him with new directions for his work. To prepare himself for this encounter with Paris and its urban population and motifs van Gogh went to the Belgian port of Antwerp. Some important changes took place in the three months he spent there. He visited the museums and carefully studied the portraiture and colourist palette of Frans Hals, and in a series of experimental portraits, of which the present painting is one, he tried to apply the animated brushwork and juxtaposed colours he had noticed in Hals's painting. Apart from a few sketches of Antwerp's landmarks and scenes in and around the cafés of the port, van Gogh concentrated on painting portraits. But they were not commissioned portraits: that market was, as he noted, being served by the photographic studios. The model for this portrait was a woman from a café-concert, a motif associated with modern city life. But van Gogh has not painted this woman, this social type, in her social setting, or in any context at all. Nor is she presented in an expressive, narrative or sentimental pose as was often the case in van Gogh's earlier images of women from his Hague period, when he used the prostitute Clasina Hoornik as his model. ## Related artworks - [A Cottage on the Heath and "The Protestant Barn"]() - [A Lane in the Public Garden at Arles]() - [A Meadow in the Mountains: Le Mas de Saint-Paul]() - [A Pair of Leather Clogs]() - [A Pair of Shoes]() - [A Pair of Shoes]() - [A Workman's Meal-Break]() - [Agostina Segatori in the Café du Tambourin]() - [Almond Tree in Blossom]() - [Apricot Trees in Blossom]() - [At Eternity's Gate \("Worn Out"\)]() - [Avenue of Plane Trees near Arles Station]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()