Self-Portrait

Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in Arles late in 1888, in the weeks he was sharing the yellow house with Paul Gauguin. All that year he had been pressing an idea on his friends: that painters should trade portraits of themselves the way people trade letters. He had already exchanged canvases by post with Gauguin, Emile Bernard and Charles Laval, building a small gallery of the circle he hoped to gather around him in the south of France. This is one of the self-portraits he made in that spirit. Where most of his Arles paintings ended up in public museums, this one passed into a private collection, and it is seldom put on view.