Autoportrait octogonal

Around 1890 Vuillard, then in his early twenties, was testing how far colour could stray from what the eye actually sees, and this small self-portrait shows how far he was prepared to go. His beard is a slab of bright orange. The hair above his ear is a flat patch of yellow, and a brown shadow takes over half of the face. He glances sideways over his shoulder, in a blue jacket and a pale collar, against a dark olive ground flecked with little strokes of red and blue. The picture is painted on cardboard about 36 centimetres high, and its outline is an octagon. In 2018, 150 years after his birth, La Poste made it into a stamp, and to keep that outline the French post office issued an eight-sided stamp for the first time.