Portrait of the Artist's Mother

Portrait of the Artist's Mother is a small oil-on-canvas portrait by Vincent van Gogh of his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbentus (1819–1907), painted in Arles in October 1888; it is in the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California.

Van Gogh's mother was an amateur artist who liked to draw plants and flowers, and some of his earliest drawings are copies of her sketches. Relations with his parents had been strained for years over his choice of career and way of life, but from Arles he sent home pictures he thought she would like, and he hoped to paint a series of family portraits. Having no sitter, he worked from a black-and-white photograph of her that had reached him through his sister Willemien. Writing to Theo that month, he said that he was doing a portrait of Mother for himself, because he could not stand the colourless photograph and wanted to make one in a harmony of colour, as he saw her in his memory. In another letter he added that he always hoped for a great revolution in portraiture.

The head and shoulders are set against a strong green ground, with a dark dress and a cap tied with dark ribbons. The face now looks sickly yellow-green, partly because the red pigments Van Gogh used have faded over time: as the Norton Simon Museum explains, there is no sign of a separate red glaze, so he probably mixed a little red lake into the paint, which once gave the face soft pinks against the green. He painted it at almost the same moment as his Self-Portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin, with a similar pose and colouring. He told Willemien that he was not especially happy with the result.

The canvas measures 40.6 × 32.4 cm. It passed through the hands of the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard before entering the Norton Simon collection, which holds six paintings by Van Gogh.