Self-Portrait

Vincent van Gogh · 1887

Medium

Oil on artist's board, mounted on cradled panel

Original size

41 × 32.5 cm (16 1/8 × 12 13/16 in.); Framed: 61.6 × 53.4 × 8.9 cm (24 1/4 × 21 × 3 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Post-Impressionism

This 1887 self-portrait captures Van Gogh at a turning point — freshly arrived in Paris, absorbing Impressionism and pointillism, and beginning to develop the charged brushwork that would define his greatest works. Painted on artist's board during his two-year stay in the French capital, it shows him experimenting directly with the broken, directional strokes he had studied in Seurat and Signac. The palette is brighter than his earlier Dutch work, the surface alive with short dabs of complementary colour that make the face seem to vibrate with inner energy. Van Gogh used himself as a model partly out of necessity — he could not always afford to pay sitters — and produced more than 35 self-portraits across his career, making this series one of the most sustained exercises in self-examination in Western art. The painting is held at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of several institutions worldwide that preserve these works as primary documents of his psychological and artistic development. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on the same oil medium as the original, with careful attention to Van Gogh's distinctive impasto rhythm — so the energy and intimacy that make this small portrait so compelling come through in every brushstroke.