Self-Portrait with Hat

The spring this face was painted, Bernard was mostly busy on someone else's behalf. In April 1892 the Paris dealer Le Barc de Boutteville let him use a gallery on the rue Le Peletier for nothing, and he filled it with 16 paintings and a number of drawings by Vincent van Gogh, dead less than two years, printing the small catalogue himself with woodcuts he had already cut. He was 24. A few weeks earlier he had shown nine of his own canvases at the Indépendants, and by May he was in Pont-Aven for the rest of the year, carving furniture and working on textiles. This is a small canvas, 55 by 45 centimetres, and the museum's own record titles it simply Self-Portrait.