Autoportrait au chapeau de paille

Van Gogh painted this in the summer of 1887, two years after the brown, heavy peasant heads he had made back in Holland. In between he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, and the city rearranged his eye. He met the Impressionists and the younger painters breaking colour into small dots, and his own palette caught fire. Here he wears a pale straw hat, the background a busy weave of blue and orange dashes laid side by side. He turned to his own face again and again in these Paris years, partly for a plain reason: he had no money to pay models, and the man in the mirror sat for free. He made more than 30 self-portraits before he died.