Self-Portrait with Palette

In September 1889, writing to his sister Willemien from the asylum at Saint-Remy, Vincent van Gogh brought up a portrait he could not forget. When Guillaumin showed it, he told her, the public and even other painters laughed at it a great deal, and yet it was one of the rare things that would hold up beside the old Dutchmen Rembrandt and Hals. This is that picture. Guillaumin painted it in 1878 and hung it two years later at the fifth Impressionist exhibition under the plain title Portrait de M.G. The colour was what people mocked. Reds, yellows, greens and blues sit loaded on the palette in his hand and turn up again in the skin of his face, and he signed and dated the canvas in red. Landscape was his real subject. Out of some 800 paintings he left only about five of himself, and Theo van Gogh bought this one for the collection he kept with his brother.