Autoportrait

Gauguin painted this in the last weeks of 1889, not on a normal canvas but on a cupboard door in a small inn at Le Pouldu, a fishing village on the coast of Brittany where he was holed up with a few fellow painters. He gives himself a golden halo, a snake between his fingers, and apples hanging above, the props of the Garden of Eden, casting himself as saint and tempter at once. The flat red and yellow ground owes nothing to how the room actually looked; he was pulling colour loose from description, toward something symbolic. It was decoration for a dining room, made half in earnest and half as a joke about his own outsized sense of himself. Its companion door held a portrait of his friend, the Dutch painter Meyer de Haan.