Self-Portrait

This is a small painting, about forty centimeters tall, showing the artist himself. He is a man with a beard, dressed in a suit, and he turns his gaze toward you. It is painted in oil on a piece of prepared artist's board rather than on canvas. What stands out first is the surface. Instead of smooth blending, the whole picture is built from small dabs and dashes of paint. Greens, blues, reds, and oranges seem to vibrate against one another, so the face and the background both shimmer with color.

Start with the eyes, near the middle of the picture. They are a deep green, and they dominate everything around them. The gaze is intense and steady. Then let your eyes move out across the face and the clothing, and notice the short, separate strokes of paint. Look for the oranges and reds mixed in among the greens and blues. Up close, they read as individual dots and dashes. Step back, and they gather into a head and shoulders. The brushwork seems to dance across the whole surface.

Vincent van Gogh painted this in 1887. In 1886 he had left his native Holland and settled in Paris, where his brother Theo worked as a dealer in paintings. The energy of the city and his first encounter with Impressionism seem to have inspired him. During his two years there, he made at least twenty-four self-portraits. This one is an early example. Its dabbed brushwork responds to Georges Seurat's famous painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, which used tiny dots of color. Van Gogh then went south to the town of Arles.

Seurat used his dots as a cool, scientific method. In Van Gogh's hands, the same idea became an intense emotional language. The brushwork, which became a hallmark of his style, carries feeling rather than calculation. Van Gogh once wrote to Theo that he preferred painting people's eyes to cathedrals, because a human soul interested him more than any solemn, imposing building. His career as a painter was very short, only about five years before his death in 1890. Look once more at the green eyes, and see how much the painting asks of them.