Self-Portrait

In the two years Van Gogh spent in Paris, from 1886 to early 1888, he painted himself more than 25 times. His own face was the one subject always within reach, and these canvases became the place where he worked out the brighter colour and the broken, hatched brushwork he was seeing in Parisian painting around him. Several of them he put on the back of earlier pictures, to spare the cost of new canvas.

This one dates from the spring or early summer of 1887. Like dozens of other studies from those months, it stayed in the apartment he shared with Theo, and was never offered for sale.