Self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh painted this in 1889, during the year he spent as a voluntary patient at the asylum of Saint-Rémy, in the south of France, after the breakdown in Arles when he cut his own ear. He made a run of self-portraits there, partly because a paying model was hard to come by and his own face was always available. Here he turns the damaged ear away from us and meets his reflection steadily, the coat and background worked in cool blue-violet, the beard in sharp strokes of red and orange. He was well enough to work in long, clear stretches between attacks. He sent canvases north to his brother Theo in Paris, and within a year of finishing pictures like this one he was dead at 37.