Self-Portrait with Japanese Print

By the time Van Gogh painted this in 1887, cheap Japanese woodblock prints were everywhere in Paris, sold by the crateful in shops near the boulevards, and he had begun buying and studying them himself. One of them hangs on the wall behind him here, and its flat colours and bold outlines are exactly the qualities he was trying to pull into his own painting. He set himself against it in a plain jacket, looking steadily out at the viewer. Van Gogh painted his own face again and again in these Paris years for a practical reason. A hired model had to be paid, and he had almost no money, while the man in the mirror would sit for nothing. This is one of the last pictures he made before he left the city for the south of France in 1888.