Having viewed Portrait of the Artist's Mother by Vincent Van Gogh and Portrait of Madame Manet by Edouard Manet, I am struck by both the similarities and differences in the artists' approaches to the portraits. Of course, the fact that both paintings are portraits of significant women figures in the artists' lives is the most striking similarity. However, there are additional similarities between the two paintings. For example, the paintings employ the same medium, oil on canvas. Furthermore, both paintings exhibit a strong contrast between light and dark, which makes the subjects of the portraits really stand out from their backgrounds. .

             Given those similarities, one might expect to have similar viewing experiences looking at the portraits. However, Van Gogh and Manet approached oil in two entirely different manners. Manet's use of oil seems to have been designed to get colors with depth and opacity. In contrast, Van Gogh's use of oil was about more than color; by applying the paint in layers of varying thickness, Van Gogh created texture and multiple dimensions in his painting. Although both artists used paint to create depth, the methods they choose to do so could not have been less similar.

             When looking at Portrait of the Artist's Mother, one of the first things that one observes is that the portrait is smaller than traditional portraits. At 15 1/2 x 12 ¼ in., Van Gogh had limited space in which to convey a likeness of his mother. Van Gogh dealt with this issue by limiting the use of background in the painting and focusing solely on his mother's face. The background, a teal blue that places the setting indoors, is remarkable for two reasons. The most fundamental reason is that the background itself contains both light and dark elements, probably created by incorporating a wet-on-wet painting technique, which mirrors the natural play of light on a background. The second reason is that the background is lighter immediately surrounding the figure in the portrait, which gives a halo-like effect to the portrait.