Autoportrait au chapeau de paille

By 1887 Van Gogh had been in Paris about a year, living with his brother Theo and too short of money to pay models. So he turned the mirror on himself, more than 20 self-portraits across those two Paris years, this among them, done partly just to keep practising the human face. Look at the broken dabs of blue and orange in the hat and beard. That is him testing the Neo-Impressionist ideas about colour he had been picking up from the younger painters around Montmartre. What makes this canvas unusual is its other side. Turn it over and there is a dark peasant woman peeling potatoes, painted two years earlier in Holland, all browns and heavy shadow. Van Gogh, saving on canvas, simply reused the board, so his gloomy Dutch years and his bright Paris ones sit back to back on one piece of cloth.