Color as Feeling

Paul Gauguin

Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les Misérables)

1888

Oil on canvas, 44.5 × 50.3 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

A painter shows himself close up, his face turned toward the viewer. It was made for an exchange of self-portraits among friends.

• He presents himself as Jean Valjean, outcast hero of a well-known French novel. Through that role he stands for all painters misunderstood by their society.
• Van Gogh proposed the exchange, after Japanese printmakers who traded their work.
• Look at upper right for the small framed portrait of the younger painter.
• The face sits against flat yellow wallpaper scattered with flowers, painted as pure pattern.
• Van Gogh's family kept it until their foundation took it over in 1962.

The younger painter shown in the background had joined him at Pont-Aven in Brittany that summer. Their meeting there fed the flat, outlined style of 1888.

Image: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), via Google Art Project · PD-Art