Autorretrato con la oreja vendada

This was painted in January 1889 in Arles, in the south of France, days after Van Gogh came home from the hospital. Late in December he had cut off part of his own left ear during a breakdown, after weeks of rising tension with Gauguin, who had been sharing his house and had just left. So he sat down and painted himself calmly, the bandage wrapped around his head, a green coat buttoned up against the cold, his pipe lit. Behind him he set two things he chose deliberately, a blank canvas on the easel showing he meant to keep working, and a Japanese print on the wall, since Japanese art was the thing he loved most and hoped to build a painters' colony around. He mirrored the wound onto the right side here because he was painting what he saw in the glass. Within four months he had committed himself to the asylum at Saint-Rémy.