Vincent Van Gogh: Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin 1888
I feel this self-portrait is different from the others Vincent painted and it is not just because his hair is cropped very short. It is because this painting has a contemporary aura, as if Vincent were a guy from our lives.
Maybe it is the “Veronese” green backdrop, which creates this feeling of timelessness with its clearness. Vincent’s out-of-the-ordinary softer brushstrokes go around his head like a halo. He used the green on the head, neck, and under the eyes also.
The pure background is a sharp contrast to Vincent’s tough appearance. He looks like someone to fear, someone who is strong and harsh. Like a freshly released prisoner, or a drug addict. Or a determine artist on his own terms.
Vincent was far from his artist friends, Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, in 1888: they were in Brittany, while Vincent was in the south of France. He proposed exchanging portraits in order to see how their work technique improved since they last met. It was a playful act, something Japanese printmakers always did among each other. Bernard and Gauguin decided to paint themselves with the other’s portrait behind them on the wall. They sent the paintings to Vincent, who then painted his own self-portrait.
Vincent wrote to Theo about his portrait: “The head is modeled in light colors painted in a thick impasto against the light background with hardly any shadows. Only I have made the eyes slightly slanting like the Japanese.” Yes, those beautifully sullen, slanting, sad eyes. They are capable of seeing everything that earthly eyes cannot. He wears his wonted coat with blue border, which appears on many of his self-portraits.
All three painters wrote dedications onto the upper half of their works, but on Vincent’s painting somebody painted his “a mon ami Paul” over, which I think was an unrighteous move.
I feel the wide, golden frame tread down the portrait and fail to match to the modern aura. It locks him in.
“One day you will also see the portrait of me, that I am sending to Gauguin, because he will keep it, I hope” Vincent wrote. Unfortunately Gauguin sold Vincent’s gift for 300 francs to the famous art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, to cover the expenses of his life in Tahiti.
Though I still believe it was heartless for him to do so, I have to mention in excuse of Gauguin that at that time, around 1897, he was very troubled financially and morally and had serious health issues as well. He already left his whole life behind and found a less materialistic world in South French Polynesia. He slowly sold everything from his own paintings to Vincent’s portrait. What could that painting of an old friend mean to Gauguin? It was only a sad memento of an ill-fated past he was willing to forget.
The painting itself traveled too, as it was in Berlin, then Munich, where the Nazis removed it from the museum, considering it “degenerate art.” Vincent must have been really afraid. His portrait survived the bombings during the war, was sold in a Nazi auction, and in the fifties it found its place in the Harvard Museum, where it belongs today.
Vincent was loyal and kept Bernard’s and Gauguin’s self-portraits that were dedicated to him and today they are both hanging (out) in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam together.