Self-Portrait
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) · 1889
Van Gogh looks over his shoulder at you with narrowed green eyes, his red beard and hair cropped close, a dark jacket buttoned to the neck. The background swirls in blue and green strokes that seem to vibrate around his head. He painted this in late August or September 1889 at the asylum of Saint-Remy in Provence, shortly after recovering from a severe attack of illness. In a letter to his brother Theo he described making a self-portrait as soon as he could work again, to see whether he had recovered his strength. The face is thin and pale, but the gaze is direct and controlled.
The paint is applied in short, thick strokes that follow the forms of the face and then break loose in the background. Look at the way the strokes on the cheek curve down toward the beard, and how the jacket is built from long bands of dark blue with touches of green. The palette is narrow, almost entirely blues and greens against the flame-coloured hair, which makes the head burn out of the canvas. Van Gogh deliberately painted himself as a working man rather than an artist with palette and brushes, a decision he wrote about, wanting the image to be plain and truthful.
Van Gogh painted more than thirty self-portraits, mostly because he could not afford models. This one belonged for many years to the American collector John Hay Whitney and his wife Betsey, who bequeathed it to the National Gallery in 1998. It is one of the last self-portraits he made, painted less than a year before his death in July 1890. Stand close and you can see raised ridges of paint casting tiny shadows, a reminder that these strokes were laid down quickly, in one or two sessions, by a man who had only just regained the steadiness to hold a brush.
Did You Know? Van Gogh told his brother Theo he painted this just after an illness to test whether his hand and mind had recovered.
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