Autoportrait avec portrait de Bernard

In the autumn of 1888 Van Gogh, living in Arles and dreaming of an artists' colony, wrote to Gauguin and to the younger painter Emile Bernard, asking each to paint his own portrait and send it south. Gauguin answered with this. He gave himself the hard, wary face of Jean Valjean, the hunted ex-convict of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables, which he had been reading that summer, and wrote the title into the lower corner. Bernard appears only as a small portrait pinned to the flowered wallpaper behind him. Gauguin told Van Gogh he meant the outlaw's features to stand for every artist wronged by society. Within weeks he carried the picture to Arles himself and moved in with Van Gogh, for the two months that ended in their famous quarrel.