Autoportrait au chapeau de paille et à la pipe

Two years before this, in the Netherlands, Van Gogh was painting peasants in browns and near-blacks. Paris turned that around. He arrived in 1886, saw the Impressionists and the even younger colourists, and his palette lifted almost overnight. Here he sits in a straw hat with his pipe, the whole head worked in restless strokes of blue, green and orange laid straight from the tube. The pipe is worth noting; it turns up again and again in his self-portraits, an everyday prop he reached for without thinking. He made a run of these small self-portraits in the summer of 1887, using his own face as the cheapest available model while he taught himself this brighter, quicker way of painting.