Vincent van Gogh
Paris, Summer 1887
Oil paint on canvas
This striking work belongs to a group of self-portraits painted on the back of canvases used by Vincent van Gogh several years earlier. He had sent them to Theo and found them in his brother’s flat when he moved to Paris, where the two men lived together. Van Gogh’s decision to reuse these canvases probably stemmed from a lack of funds for new painting materials.
The painting shows him wearing a painter’s blue smock, a departure from previous self-portraits, in which he had most often presented himself as a well-dressed Parisian bourgeois.