Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear

Van Gogh painted this in January 1889, only a week or so after he walked out of the hospital in Arles. A few weeks earlier, after an argument with the painter Gauguin, who had been sharing his house, he had cut off part of his own ear. In a letter to his brother Theo on the 17th of January he mentions a new self-portrait, and this is almost certainly it. So the calm of the picture is a little startling. He faces us squarely in a blue fur-lined cap and a heavy green coat, the bandage wrapped under his chin, and behind him he has hung one of the Japanese prints he collected and loved. Steady hand, careful colour. Whatever had just happened to him, the painter in him was completely intact.