Self-Portrait

Turn this canvas over and there is the head of a peasant woman on the other side, painted in the village of Nuenen in the spring of 1885. Two years later, in the summer of 1887, Van Gogh took that old study out in Paris and used the back of it for his own face. The two sides come from different worlds of paint. The head is built from the browns and greys of his Dutch years, while this portrait is made of short strokes of separated colour, the lesson of the painters he had been meeting around Montmartre. Reusing a canvas this way was cheap, and he did it often that year. In the Van Gogh Museum's records the picture still carries two numbers, one for the 1885 head at the front and one for the self-portrait behind it.