Autorretrato com o Cristo Amarelo

Gauguin painted this in Brittany around 1890, in the months before he sailed for Tahiti for the first time. He was 42, little known, short of money, and his wife had gone home to Denmark with their children. So he set himself between two things he had already made. Behind one shoulder hangs his own Yellow Christ, mirror-reversed so it reads correctly to us, and on the other side sits a strange ceramic jug he had shaped into his own scowling face. It is really three self-portraits in one frame. Gauguin often used the figure of Christ to stand for himself and the sacrifices he felt his art demanded. Within a year he had left France for the Pacific.