Self-Portraits

Twenty-four self-portraits spanning Van Gogh's artistic life — from the dark, tentative early works painted in Antwerp and Paris to the swirling, psychologically penetrating images of his final years. No artist has left a more honest or more harrowing record of self-examination. Van Gogh painted himself because he could not afford models, but the necessity became a compulsion: each portrait is a confrontation with his own changing face, his own shifting mental state, his own relentless artistic evolution. The early portraits are dark and Dutch; the Parisian portraits explode into color as he discovers Impressionism; the Arles and Saint-Rémy portraits — bandaged ear, asylum background, haunted green eyes — are among the most psychologically intense images in the history of art. Together they form an autobiography in paint, more revealing than any written confession.