Autoportrait

Van Gogh painted this in Paris in 1887, two years before Arles and the sunflowers most people picture. He had arrived in the city dark-toned and provincial, and there he collided with the newest thing in French painting, the tiny separated dots of Georges Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists. You can see him testing it here, the whole surface broken into short green, blue, red, and orange strokes. What was for Seurat a cool, almost scientific system becomes in Van Gogh's hands something restless and charged, the dabs converging on the fixed green stare of his own eyes. He painted it on a piece of artist's board rather than canvas. It is one of many self-portraits from these Paris years, and it hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.