As Chelsea art galleries reel from the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy, it may be time to trek to the Upper East Side, where the Frick Collection has just unveiled a striking Van Gogh portrait on loan from California.

“Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) has not left its home institution, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, in nearly forty years, making this a rare and exciting viewing opportunity for East Coast audiences,” says the museum. “A drawing in reed pen that Van Gogh had made after the painting and sent to Theo would not have prepared his brother for the shock of the life-size, bust-length figure painted in vivid blue, bright yellow, and green, with a network of reds, ochers, gold, and green in the face. Such audacity in portraiture would not be seen again until the early twentieth century in the work of Matisse.

“The painting, together with Vincent’s many statements about his artistic process and the deep significance of portraiture for him at this time, is a profound testament to a turning point in a great artist’s work. Using high-keyed colors, he stepped boldly off the path of strict naturalistic representation into a more subjective realm in which he attempted to express the spirit or essence of his sitter through color and its symbolic associations. At the same time, the sitter, whom he refers to in another letter as a ‘pure-bred’ peasant, brings him back to his early work in Nuenen, Holland, in which he aspired to be a “peasant painter” and to dignify and give recognition to the common man through portraiture.”

Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of a Peasant (Patience Escalier) will remain on view through January 20, 2013 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, at Fifth Avenue, 212-288-0700, frick.org.

Franklin Einspruch is the art critic for The New York Sun. He blogs at Artblog.net.