Self-Portrait as a Painter

Today is our last Sunday with van Gogh self-portraits from Van Gogh Museum collection - I hope you enjoyed our collaboration and learnt a lot about this marvelous artist. Today we had to present something special so here it is, the quintessence of art, a self-portrait of an artist who presents himself... as an artist :) Enjoy! Next week we introduce another partnership with another great museum, based in Vienna, which has one of the biggest collections in the world. Any guesses? :) But back to van Gogh now! Van Gogh presented himself in this self-portrait as a painter, holding a palette and paintbrushes behind his easel. He showed that he was a modern artist by using a new painting style, with bright, almost unblended colors. The palette contains the complementary color pairs red/green, yellow/purple and blue/orange – precisely the colors Van Gogh used for this painting. He laid these pairs down side by side to intensify one another: the blue of his smock, for instance, and the orange-red of his beard. Self-Portrait as a Painter was the last work Van Gogh produced in Paris; the city had exhausted him both mentally and physically. He told his sister Wil how he had portrayed himself: ‘wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad’.