Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Père Tanguy, Private collection

"But how did you become a frame maker?""

"That happened in Julien's shop. He was a pudgy little man with one eye much larger than the other, homely but amusing. I liked him because he was a provincial too, from Brittany, and wore a straw farmer's hat. I appreciated his politics. He had been a Communard, had gone to prison for it. Artists adored him. They called him Père Tanguy because he slipped tubes of paint into the satchels of the poor ones whose talents he believed in when his eagle-eyed wife wasn't looking. And he hung their paintings on his walls to try to sell them in his shop."