Self-Portrait with Pipe

This is among the first self-portraits Van Gogh ever painted, made in Paris in the autumn of 1886, soon after he arrived to live with his brother Theo. The colour is still dark and warm, brown and reddish, close to the older French painter Adolphe Monticelli, whose thickly loaded canvases Van Gogh was admiring just then. He holds a pipe clamped in his mouth and looks out steadily, his hair and beard the reddish colour he was known for. Over the next few years he would paint himself again and again, partly for a simple reason: a painter with no money for models always has one sitter within reach.