Autoportrait

In 1888 Van Gogh left Paris for the town of Arles in the south of France, chasing stronger light and cheaper rooms. He painted himself often that year, partly for a plain reason. A model who sat for free and never complained was himself, and money was always short. He lived on what his brother Theo, an art dealer in Paris, sent him. Van Gogh treated his own face as a place to test what colour could do, laying strokes of one shade beside another so that they mix in your eye instead of on the palette. He made more than 30 self-portraits across his life, most of them in his last four years, when he had almost no one else willing to sit for him.