#couple

Nobody's actually sure who these two are, or which couple from the Old Testament they're dressed up as — the title only got attached by a dealer a couple of hundred years later and stuck. Van Gogh supposedly said he'd give ten years of his life to sit in front of it for a fortnight with nothing but a dry crust to eat.

The name everyone calls this by wasn't his — someone else stuck it on later, and he'd used a much gentler title himself. He painted the same two people over and over, six goes at it in about two years, from what I can find.

She's the one who ordered this, according to Wikipedia — not just a sitter but his working partner, translating English chemistry into French and drawing the plates for his book. He made his money collecting taxes, which is what got him executed a few years after this was painted.

This came near the end of his life — the 1918 flu got him at twenty-eight, a few days after it got his wife. Early on he'd done a stretch in jail over drawings somebody decided were indecent, and from what I can find that hung over him for years afterwards.

Apparently the colours aren't random: her pale blue and his red were meant to echo the flags of the alliance fighting Austria at the time this was painted. Some readings even spot a dagger half-hidden in his cloak — less a lover saying goodbye, more someone about to go do something dangerous.

One of three dance scenes a dealer commissioned in one go, so they're usually talked about as a set rather than on their own. The woman modelling is said to be Suzanne Valadon, who was posing for painters at the time and went on to become a serious painter herself — which nobody seems to have expected.

The title's a whole sentence, which I've never seen before. They say he and his wife were both painters working in Los Angeles — I couldn't find out for sure whether that's the two of them standing there, but everyone seems to assume it is.

There's actual gold leaf on this, plus silver and platinum — his father was a gold engraver, it's said, so he knew the trade before he ever painted. When it first went on show it was listed under a plainer name, just 'lovers'.