Vincent van Gogh painted more than thirty self-portraits, almost all of them between 1886 and 1889. He did it for a plain reason that gets romanticized far too often: he could not afford models, and his own face was free.
portraits and figures covers what a numbered canvas can and cannot do with a face.
They are worth looking at in sequence, because across roughly four years you can watch a painter teach himself in public — the handling changes, the color changes, and the man looking back changes with them.
Why he painted himself so often
Van Gogh lived on money sent by his brother Theo and spent most of it on materials. Paying someone to sit for hours was not possible, and he had few friends in Paris willing to do it for nothing.
He also had a model in Rembrandt, who made something close to a hundred self-portraits across painting, etching and drawing over a lifetime. Van Gogh admired him enormously.
The vanity reading is the wrong one. These are practice, made by someone with no formal training who was trying to work out how paint behaves on a face.
Paris, 1886–1888
He arrived in Paris in early 1886 and the change is immediate. The Dutch work before it is dark, earthy, heavy. Within two years he is painting in broken strokes of bright, barely mixed color.
Several Paris self-portraits show him deliberately respectable — good suit, felt hat, the look of a man presenting himself as a professional. Others are studies in technique, where the face is almost an excuse to try something.
Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1887) is the one most people picture from this period. The background is worked in short directional strokes radiating out around his head, which is him absorbing what the Neo-Impressionists were doing with dots and converting it into something of his own — strokes rather than points, following the form instead of sitting flat on it.
The straw-hat portraits belong here too, from the same Paris years. They are not late works, despite frequently being described that way.
Arles, and the ear
Van Gogh left Paris for Arles in early 1888, hoping to establish a community of artists in the south. Paul Gauguin came to stay in October.
It went badly. The two argued constantly, and on the evening of 23 December 1888 Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear. He took it to a nearby brothel. He was hospitalized, and afterwards said he could remember nothing of it.
The details beyond that are genuinely disputed — including exactly how much of the ear was removed and what Gauguin's role was. Accounts that narrate the night confidently, minute by minute, are inventing it.
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) was painted after he came home from hospital. He is in his coat and fur hat, the bandage on the right side of the picture — which is his left ear, because he painted what he saw in a mirror. That reversal is why people regularly get the wrong side. The painting is in the Courtauld Gallery in London.
Behind him hangs a Japanese print. He collected them, and their flat color and strong outlines shaped almost everything he did in Arles.
Saint-Rémy, 1889
He admitted himself to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in May 1889. In July he collapsed while painting in the fields nearby and was unable to work for weeks.
The self-portrait he made on recovering is the one now in the Musée d'Orsay — the swirling blue-green background pulling around his head in the same rhythm as the sky in The Starry Night, which he had painted a few weeks earlier. It is probably the best-known image of him that exists.
Self-Portrait without Beard (1889) is unusual — clean-shaven, which he almost never was — and he sent it to his mother as a birthday present.
He died at Auvers-sur-Oise on 29 July 1890, two days after shooting himself. The self-portraits stop in 1889. Any work dated after his death is misattributed.
What they are worth
Almost all of them are in museums and will never come to market. The Musée d'Orsay, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Courtauld and the National Gallery of Art in Washington hold the best known.
A self-portrait sold at auction in 1998 for around $71 million, which remains the reference point for one changing hands. You will see much larger figures quoted, but those usually belong to other paintings — Portrait of Dr Gachet, which fetched $82.5 million in 1990, is a portrait of his physician, not a self-portrait. The two get mixed up constantly.
Portraits of him by other painters
A few contemporaries painted him, which is useful — it lets you see how much of the self-portraits is self-interpretation.
- John Peter Russell (1886) — an Australian painter Van Gogh met in Paris, who made a conventional, realistic portrait of him. Van Gogh valued it.
- Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1887) — a pastel of Van Gogh at a café table, done in rapid hatched strokes.
- Paul Gauguin (1888) — painted him at work, canvas in front of him, mid-brushstroke. Van Gogh reportedly said it showed him as a madman.
What to actually look at
If you want to get something out of these beyond the biography, compare two from different years and watch three things:
- The direction of the strokes. Early on they describe the form. Later they take on a life of their own and start moving independently of what they depict.
- How little he mixes. Colors are laid side by side and left to combine in your eye rather than on the palette.
- The background. In the Paris works it sits behind him. By 1889 it is doing as much as the face.
We wrote separately about The Starry Night, painted in the same weeks as the Saint-Rémy self-portrait, and about layering paint if you want to try building a surface that way.
If you want to paint rather than read
Van Gogh taught himself with no training, which is inspiring right up until you are sitting in front of a blank canvas with no idea what to do.
A paint by numbers kit takes composition and color mixing off the table so you can concentrate on handling a brush. Ledgebay's designs are original artwork licensed from working painters rather than reproductions of famous paintings, and there is a custom option made from your own photograph — including, if you like, your own face.
