It first appeared in the catalog drawn up in 1928—revised in 1970—by Jacob-Baart de la Faille, entitled "The work of Vincent Van Gogh", which numbered the painting as 531.

Instead, other hypotheses hold that the title derives from the possibility that it is the portrait of the gardener of the psychiatric hospital of Saint Rémy, where Vincent van Gogh was a patient between April 1889 and May 1890.

[2] The dating of the month of execution is approximate—although today almost all critics accept it as valid—because Van Gogh does not mention the work in the numerous letters he wrote to his brother Theo and friends.

[1] After its arrival in Italy, The Gardener was loaned for the Italian exhibition dedicated to the impressionists organized by the writer and painter Ardengo Soffici between April and May 1910 in the halls of the Lyceum Club in Florence.

[12][11] That same year, Soffici gave a not very positive opinion on The Gardener, since in Van Gogh's work he observed a break with the lessons of Cézanne, an artist he held in high esteem:[1] There is no lack of virtues... (but when it emerges, it fails).

[13] Although Van Gogh had not yet reached the popularity that the art market brought him in the 1980s, the painting was already recognized as the most precious and valuable piece in that collection, so that during the end of World War II Verusio, who had taken refuge in a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, hid it in a wooden box under the straw of a lemon tree greenhouse in Pian dei Giullari to protect it from looting by German soldiers.

The possession of the painting allowed the family to enter the salons of high society and to interact with the great personalities of their time thanks to the numerous requests that the Verusio couple received to be able to admire the Van Gogh.

Figures of the artistic world such as Renato Guttuso and the art critic Giuliano Briganti passed by, as well as other important personalities from different fields: for example, the lawyer Agnelli came to the Verusio family home on several occasions to admire the canvas.

During the vacations I would take it to the bank with the Cinquecento, accompanied only by an old houseboy; such recklessness!Tired of this situation, the lawyer Verusio decided to sell the canvas, which was acquired in 1977 for the figure of 600 million liras, well below the price of the painting at the time, which was estimated at least 1.2 billion.

[16] The Italian State mobilized only in 1988, at the height of the impressionist collecting market, when Beyeler announced that he was going to sell the work to the Guggenheim Museum in Venice for the sum of fourteen billion lire.

Van Gogh's The Gardener, as the theft from the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome in May 1998 had already shown, remains in Italy and will serve to enrich the already rich state cultural heritage; a demonstration that, once again, the priority of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities is to protect and maintain the integrity of our artistic heritage.Between the night of May 19 and 20, 1998, the painting earned a space on all the front pages of the newspapers because it was the object of a robbery at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome.

In addition to The Gardener, the thieves took L'arlésienne (Madame Ginoux), also painted by Van Gogh in 1890, and Le Cabanon de Jourdan, a work by Paul Cézanne (1906).

[21] The Italian-Belgian leader of the gang of thieves, Eneo Ximenes, commented upon being arrested:[21] Congratulations, you did a good job, I'm screwed.In the period between the theft and the recovery, the paintings had been taken to Turin to be sold to a buyer.

The latter had backed out at the last moment because of the media tension that the event had raised and did not want to buy it despite a significant discount on the sale offered by the thieves, who had initially negotiated the operation with a price starting at fifteen to twenty billion lire.

[4] The very stylistic and pictorial solutions he carried out in the portrait denote that attunement, especially in the lines of the composition that make the subject merge with the landscape; in the luminosity of the painting and in the combination of colors.

The young man wears a white shirt with vertical red and green lines, made with a very fast and dynamic brushstroke, with long strokes and wider than those of the face.

This shirt is delimited at the shoulders by a dark line that traces the outline of the protagonist and is characterized by a wavy flow, typical of the expressive quality of Van Gogh's late style.

However, this can be found in the two copies of the painting Two Girls (both 1890), where in the background some houses can be recognized, and also in Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), made with the etching technique and with a fence that limits a garden with hedges and a small plant.

The other two are L'Arlésienne (Madame Ginoux) (1890),[33] which is preserved in Rome alongside The Gardener, and Breton Women (1888), which remains in the Grasi Collection of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna.

[34][35][note 2] Until 2011, The Gardener was in Room XIV, dedicated to impressionism, its beginnings and its development, alongside works by less famous Italian authors who had gone to Paris to soak up the essence of the new European artistic currents.

1900) by Hendrik Willem Mesdag; Poachers in the Snow (1867) by Gustave Courbet, which can be defined as an advance to Impressionist trends; Place Saint-Michelle et la Sainte Chapelle (1896) by Jean-François Raffaelli; Water Lilies in Pink (1897–1899) by Claude Monet and Edgar Degas's pastel painting Apré le bain (ca.

[40] Therefore, The Gardener is a fundamental work in the brief chronological and artistic journey that the museum creates around the impressionist current, plenairist art and studies dedicated to color.