Autoritratto con cappello di feltro grigio

By the time Van Gogh painted this, in the winter of 1887, he had spent almost two years in Paris with his brother Theo, and the city had pulled the darkness out of his palette. He had seen the young painters around Seurat building pictures out of small separate dots, and here he borrows the idea without following the rule. The brushstrokes fan out around his head in every direction, orange against blue, green against red, until the colours seem to buzz. He made more than 20 self-portraits in Paris, partly because he could not afford models. This is one of the last of them before he left for the south and the sun he was after.