Self-Portrait
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1889
Van Gogh looks out with a steady, wary gaze from a background that seems to move. He painted this in September 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown in Arles that ended his friendship with Gauguin and cost him part of an ear. He shows himself in a good suit rather than a painter's smock, hair and beard neatly trimmed, a man trying to look composed. Yet the pale blue and green swirls behind him, and the same coiling strokes in his jacket, turn the whole surface into a field of nervous energy that seems to rise from within.
The palette is deliberately narrow: cool blue-greens for everything except the flame-coloured hair and beard and the flesh of the face, which is built from thin greens, ochres and pinks. That contrast makes the head burn against the background. The brushwork is dense and directional, the strokes curving with the forms and then spinning free in the space around him. Look at the eyes, which are painted with small firm touches and hold you with an intensity out of proportion to the size of the canvas. Van Gogh told his brother that he had painted it in a period of calm, and that the picture was an attempt to show himself as sane.
He painted more than thirty self-portraits in four years, largely because he could not afford models, and this is thought to be among the last. Soon afterwards he moved north to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he died in July 1890. The painting belonged to Vincent's brother Theo and then to Theo's family, and was given to the French state in 1949 by Paul and Marguerite Gachet, the children of the doctor who cared for the painter at Auvers. It is the self-portrait most people have in mind when they picture Van Gogh.
Did You Know? Van Gogh sent this portrait to his brother Theo with a note saying he hoped it would show that his mind was calmer, even if his gaze looked vaguer than before.
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