In the two years Vincent van Gogh lived in Paris, he painted at least twenty-four self-portraits. This 1887 one, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, shows him trying out a brand-new way of painting on himself.
What you're looking at
It is a head-and-shoulders portrait, and the paint is applied in short dabs and dashes of color. The Art Institute lists intense greens, blues, reds and oranges dancing across the surface. Dominating it all are Van Gogh's deep green eyes and the intensity of his gaze. It is fairly small, and it is painted on prepared artist's board, not on canvas.
Learning from Seurat
Van Gogh left Holland in 1886 and settled in Paris, where his brother Theo was a dealer in paintings. The city and his first look at Impressionism seem to have fired him up. The museum says the dense brushwork here responds to Georges Seurat's pointillist technique in "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte." For Seurat, dots of color were a cool, scientific method. In Van Gogh's hands they became, in the museum's words, "an intense emotional language."
Why the eyes matter
The Art Institute quotes something Van Gogh once wrote to Theo: "I prefer painting people's eyes to cathedrals. However solemn and imposing the latter may be, a human soul, be it that of a poor streetwalker, is more interesting to me." You can see that preference here. Everything around the eyes is busy and flickering, and the eyes are where your own gaze lands.
One detail to look for
Step close and find the individual strokes in the background, then step back and watch them settle into a face. Van Gogh was still only a few years into painting. By his death in 1890, he had worked seriously as an artist for just five years.
A long trip to Chicago
After Van Gogh's death, this portrait belonged to his sister-in-law, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, in Amsterdam. In 1912 she sold it through the Frankfurter Kunstverein to a collector in Cologne. It was sold on in Amsterdam in 1933, then went through a Paris gallery and its New York branch. Joseph Winterbotham of Burlington, Vermont, owned it by 1935. He died in 1953, and the painting came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954 as part of the Joseph Winterbotham Collection.