Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat

Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in Paris in 1887, during the two years he lived with his brother Theo in Montmartre. He was 34 years old and had just discovered the color theories of the Impressionists after a decade of dark, earth-toned Dutch painting. The canvas is small, about 16 by 12 inches. Van Gogh stares out at the viewer with a tense, searching expression. He wears a yellow straw hat against a blue-green background dotted with tiny flecks of complementary color. The brushwork is short and nervous, the paint laid on in quick directional strokes that follow the contours of his face. The palette is brighter than anything he had used before, but the greens and blues still carry a chill that the yellow hat cannot quite warm. Van Gogh produced more than 20 self-portraits during his Paris period. He painted himself partly out of necessity: he could not afford to pay models, and he was the only subject always available. But he also used self-portraits as a laboratory. Each one tested a different approach to color, brushwork, and composition. This one experiments with Neo-Impressionist color contrast, placing warm yellows against cool blues to make both vibrate. By 1887, the Impressionist group exhibitions had ended, and the Paris avant-garde was fragmenting. Seurat was developing pointillism. Gauguin had returned from Martinique. Signac was painting along the Seine. Van Gogh absorbed all of it, borrowing techniques from each, but his work never settled into any single camp. His brushwork was always more physical and agitated than the smooth dots of the Neo-Impressionists. Oil on canvas, 40 by 32 centimeters. The paint is applied thickly in the hat and beard, thinner in the background. You can see where Van Gogh scraped back and repainted the area around the eyes. The surface has the compressed energy of someone working fast in a small room. This portrait works well in a narrow wall space: beside a doorway, between bookshelves, or in a hallway. The vertical format and the intense gaze draw the eye in close. The cool palette suits a room with gray or blue walls, and the straw hat adds a spot of warmth that pairs with natural wood tones. The 8x10 framed version is a good size for a bedside table or a small study. The painting entered the Met's collection in 1967, bequeathed by Adelaide Milton de Groot. It has the unusual feature of a second painting on the reverse: The Potato Peeler, an earlier work that Van Gogh painted over to create the self-portrait. This is a public domain artwork (CC0), scanned from the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 18x24 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.