Autorretrato

Van Gogh painted this in September 1889, and he was not a free man when he did it. After the breakdown in Arles the winter before, the one that ended with his ear, he had committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy, in the south of France. He spent about 13 months there and painted furiously, more than 140 canvases, the olive groves, the cypresses, the starry night. This is likely the last self-portrait he ever made. He turns his good side toward us, in a pale blue-grey coat, and holds himself almost rigid. Then look at everything around him. The wall behind, his hair, his beard, all of it dissolves into the same restless swirling strokes you know from The Starry Night, as if the whole room were slowly turning. He sent the painting to his brother Theo, and told him it showed him grown calmer, though the background says otherwise. Within a year he had left the asylum for the north, and by the following July he was dead. The steady eyes and the churning wall belong to the same man, painted in the same hour.