The Painter on His Way to Work

What you are looking at is a photograph. The painting itself no longer exists. Van Gogh made it in Arles in the summer of 1888, a portrait of himself trudging down a sunlit road toward the town of Tarascon, loaded with paint boxes, canvas, and easel, his shadow thrown hard across the dust. He called it a rough sketch of himself in a letter to his brother Theo. The picture later hung in a museum in Magdeburg in Germany. During the Second World War it was moved to a salt mine for safekeeping and disappeared in 1945, most likely burned. Everything we know of its colour now comes from reproductions made before the fire.