Vincent van Gogh
Today is our third Sunday with van Gogh's self-portraits from van Gogh Museum collection. I hope you will like today's work:).
‘People say – and I’m quite willing to believe it – that it’s difficult to know oneself – but it’s not easy to paint oneself either’, Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo. In this self-portrait, Van Gogh presents himself as a respectable bourgeois, wearing an elegant suit and felt hat. The small painting is done in shades of pastel grey – an unusual palette for Van Gogh, who also used it here for the colour of his eyes. In reality his eyes were green. The bright red beard stands out strongly against the grey tones. Van Gogh painted a matching portrait of his brother Theo. Both works are unusually small and fairly detailed and might have been intended to demonstrate the superiority of painted portraits over their photographic equivalents. He considered the latter to be ‘waxy and smooth and cold’, he wrote. Painted portraits, by contrast, had ‘a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter’.