Автопортрет без бороды

By the late summer of 1889 Van Gogh had been a voluntary patient at the asylum in Saint-Rémy for several months, working between attacks of the illness that would kill him within a year. His mother was turning 70, up in the Netherlands, and he wanted to send her something for the occasion. So he painted himself the way he wanted her to see him: clean-shaven, steady, a plain green coat against a swirling green ground, looking calm and well. He had recently cut off the beard he wears in almost every other portrait, which is why this is the only one where his face is bare. There is no wound and no bandage here, nothing of the crisis he was living through. He kept back the darker canvases from that same season and chose this reassuring face to travel north to a woman who would outlive him.