Focus on Portrait of the Artist's Mother (Van Gogh) and discuss the Portraits.
Van Gogh, known for his landscapes, seemed to find painting portraits his greatest ambition. He said of portrait studies, "the only thing in painting that excites me to the depths of my soul, and which makes me feel the infinite more than anything else."  To his sister he wrote, "I should like to paint portraits which appear after a century to people living then as apparitions. By which I mean that I do not endeavor to achieve this through photographic resemblance, but my means of our impassioned emotions -- that is to say using our knowledge and our modern taste for color as a means of arriving at the expression and the intensification of the character."As much as Van Gogh liked to paint portraits of people, there were few opportunities for him to pay or arrange for models for his work which may have been another factor in his desire to make a portrait of his mother.