Self-Portrait as a Painter

Van Gogh painted this at the very end of his time in Paris, over the winter of 1887 into 1888, the last thing he made there before taking a train south to Arles. Two years in the city had worn him out, and he showed it: he stands at his easel in a painter's smock, palette in hand, and described himself to his sister as wrinkled, stiff, with a very red beard, unkempt and sad. But the paint tells another story. It is bright and broken into little separate strokes, everything he had learned from the Paris pictures around him, a long way from the brown weavers he had painted three years before. Within weeks of finishing it, he packed up and left Paris for the south.