Self-Portrait
Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890) · 1887
Van Gogh looks at us over his shoulder in a brown coat and a grey felt hat, his red beard trimmed, his eyes green and wary. The picture is small, painted on a piece of cardboard, and the whole surface is alive with short strokes of blue, green, orange and red that radiate from the head like a halo. It was painted in Paris in the winter of 1887, when he was thirty four, and it is one of more than twenty self portraits from those two Paris years. He painted himself because he could not afford models, and because he was trying to teach himself the new French way of painting.
Look at how the strokes are laid. Around the head they run in one direction, in the coat in another, and in the face itself the touches follow the shape of the cheek and the brow, so that the paint models the form the way a sculptor's thumb would. The colours are put next to each other rather than mixed: an orange beard against a blue coat, a green eye ringed with red. Van Gogh had absorbed the ideas of Seurat and Signac about dots of complementary colour, and then made them his own by using them with such speed and force.
The Rijksmuseum has only one Van Gogh and this is it, so it hangs alone among the painters of the Hague School and the Amsterdam impressionists who were his contemporaries. It was bought in 1931 with the support of the Rembrandt Society. A few streets away the Van Gogh Museum has many more, but this one has the advantage of context: you see him here as a Dutch painter who left for Paris and came back, in this small piece of cardboard, transformed.
Did You Know? Van Gogh painted more than twenty self portraits in Paris because he could not afford to pay models.
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