Girl in White

Vincent van Gogh

National Gallery of Art

Shown from the knees up, a pale-skinned woman wearing a floppy, canary-yellow hat and a long white dress stands in a field of spring green in this vertical painting. Brushstrokes and loose dabs of paint are visible throughout. The woman’s body is angled to our left, and she looks off in that direction with bright green eyes. Her nose, eyebrows, and narrow chin are outlined with medium brown, and her pink lips are closed. Her black hair is pulled back under the hat, the wide brim of which droops down either side of her face. A sky-blue ribbon or decoration is on the front of the crown. Her dress has a high collar, a fitted bodice, long sleeves, and a long skirt. Pale pink daubs on the white dress are thickly applied so the texture of the paint can be seen on the surface of the canvas. The background is painted with long and short curved dashes of celery green layered over laurel and cool green. Several tangerine-orange dots, a few shell-pink dabs, and some angular, heart-shaped forms in cobalt blue to each side of the woman suggest flowers.