Self-Portrait

Bernard turned 50 in the spring of 1918, and he sat out the last year of the war in Tonnerre, the small Burgundian town he had made his home after coming back to France. He painted himself repeatedly across his long life, and this face belongs to the late group. The same museum keeps the self-portrait he made in 1888, at 20, with a portrait of Gauguin pinned to the wall behind his head, so the two hang in one collection about 30 years apart. In 1919 he gave up Tonnerre and moved back to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1941.