Self-Portrait

Through all his years in the Netherlands Van Gogh painted no self-portraits at all. In the two years he spent in Paris he made more than 20 of them, and this is among the smallest, oil on a piece of cardboard 19 centimetres tall. It dates from the spring or summer of 1887, the months he was out along the Seine at Asnières with Paul Signac, ten years younger than him and already committed to laying down separate dots and dashes of pure colour. The self-portraits of that year are where Van Gogh tested the divided touch, working on scraps of board only a little larger than a postcard, in a flat where a mirror cost nothing and a model cost money he did not have.