自画像

For fifty years this was the self-portrait nobody was sure of. Its dull greens, the sidelong sunken look, the paint pushed around with a knife, none of it matched the Van Gogh people thought they knew, and from 1970 many experts called it a fake. In 2020 the Van Gogh Museum settled the question. It is genuine, and it is unlike the others for a reason. He painted it in the late summer of 1889 at the asylum in Saint-Remy, at the tail end of a severe breakdown that had gripped him for about six weeks. It appears to be the only picture he made while actually in the grip of that illness. He turns a wary, exhausted face half away from us. The Oslo museum bought it in 1910, the first Van Gogh self-portrait to enter any public collection.