This is a two-sided painting. On one side is a bright portrait of Vincent van Gogh in a straw hat, made of short, separate dabs of color. On the other is a dark peasant scene he had painted two years earlier, in another country.
What you're looking at
Van Gogh painted himself in the summer of 1887 in a straw hat, with short, separate dabs of color rather than smooth blending. He was living in Paris with his brother Theo, where he was seeing Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist art first-hand.
Why he painted himself
The Met explains that Van Gogh was short of funds but still determined to improve at painting the human figure, so he became his own sitter. In a letter to Theo in September 1888, after he had moved to Arles, he wrote: “I purposely bought a good enough mirror to work from myself, for want of a model.” He painted more than twenty self-portraits during his time in Paris, from 1886 to 1888.
The picture on the back
The Met notes that several of his Paris self-portraits were painted on the reverse of earlier peasant studies, and this is one of them. The other side is The Potato Peeler, painted in February or March of 1885 in Nuenen, in the Netherlands, the year before he left for France. It is nothing like the self-portrait. Its palette is restricted and dark, the paint is coarse, and the drawing is blocky. In the winter of 1884–85 he painted more than forty studies of peasant heads, leading up to his first large multi-figure painting, The Potato Eaters.
A style that changed in two years
Between the two sides of this canvas, Van Gogh's whole way of painting shifted. In Paris he saw the Impressionists in person and the newest work by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He lightened his palette and tried both broken Impressionist brushstrokes and the dotted touch of the Neo-Impressionists. You can see that mix in the straw hat portrait.
What to look for
Look for the short, separate strokes of color that show his new Paris influences. Then remember that the dark, blocky Nuenen peasant study sits on the other side of the same piece of cloth.