Among the painters who influenced Vincent (Millet, Delacroix, Rembrandt…), he probably was the least(well)-known. Nevertheless, Vincent had been collecting Monticelli’s works and admired him since Paris (he had Theo bought six of his works), and he was thinking of him when he came to Arles.
Vincent identified to that “man who rather sadly died in Marseille and probably as a real Gethsémani”: “as for me, I’m sure I follow in his wake as if I were his son or brother. We will go to Marseille, I suggested I walked along the Canebière in the clothes he used to wear, I saw his portrait with a big yellow hat, a black velvet jacket, white trousers, yellow gloves and a reed stick, with a great Southern look on my face”. “.
In the same letter to his sister Wilhema (October 1888), Vincent made that astonishing description of Monticelli: “a painter who represented the Midi drowned in yellow, in orange, in sulphur”, a sentence which could suit his own work…