Portrait of Dr. Gachet (First Version) — How it survives reproduction

What survives the printing

Three things carry over well in Portrait of Dr. Gachet (First Version): the composition, the colour relationships, and the drawing underneath. Those are the parts a file can hold.

Two things do not: the thickness of the paint and the way the surface catches light. A print is flat. Anyone who tells you a reproduction looks like the original is selling something.

Why the yellows are the hard part

Vincent's yellows were often chrome yellow, which darkens with age; some of what we see now is not what he saw. Reproductions tend to correct this, which is defensible but should be said out loud.

Our files are colour-managed to the current appearance of the original, not to a guess about 1888. On a screen the picture will look brighter than it does on cotton canvas. That gap is normal.

Canvas, cotton, paper

On canvas, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (First Version) keeps its weight. The weave adds a texture that reads as paint from a distance, which is a small honest deception.

On a t-shirt or a tote the image is compressed into a soft surface and loses the fine drawing. It still works as a graphic; it stops working as a painting. Knowing which one you want is most of the decision.

What we print from

Where Musée d'Orsay, Paris publishes an open-access file we print from that, colour-managed to the current state of the painting. Where the file is not open, we do not print the picture at all.

We do not upscale, repaint or 'restore' the files. If a crack or a faded passage is visible in the source, it is visible in the print. That is the point of a reproduction rather than an interpretation.

Portrait of Dr. Gachet (First Version) is one of 13 pictures from the Auvers-sur-Oise years in this library. The palette runs to blue, green, red; the original is at Musée d'Orsay, Paris. The largest reproduction we print is 60 × 90 cm, which is enough to read the composition and not enough to read every stroke — that is the honest trade a print makes.

Source note: catalogue data from the holding museum; quotations from Vincent van Gogh's correspondence; image files from open-access museum releases where available. Dated, not completed — see the note on dating in the article above.