Self-portrait, 1889

Title

Self-portrait, 1889

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

"Self-Portrait, 1889"

Artist: Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890)

Title: Self-Portrait

Object Type: Painting

Genre: Self-portrait

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Height: 57.7 cm (22.7 in); Width: 44.5 cm (17.5 in)

Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. USA

Current Location: West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 83

Painting History:

1904: J.J. Isaacson [1859-1942], The Hague. Hugo Tutein Nolthenius [1863-1944], Delft[1]
1945: Private Collection, Switzerland[2]
9 June 1947 (M. Knoedler & Co., New York) sold to Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, New York;[3]
gift 1998 to NGA.
↑ According to J. B. de la Faille, The Works of Vincent van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings, rev. ed., Amsterdam, 1970: F626, the painting was lent by Nolthenius to a 1904 exhibition in Rotterdam. Thea Sternheim, wife of the German playwright Carl Sternheim, writes in her diary that they saw the portrait on exhibition in Rotterdam in 1910, lent by Tutein Nolthenius. The painting is still as in the Nothenius collection in the 1939 edition of J. B. de la Faille's book. This owner also lent the painting to exhibitions in Rotterdam in 1927, London in 1929, Amsterdam in 1930, and Delft in 1941. Nolthenius' collection was dispersed by his heirs following his death in 1944. An appraisal of the collection dated February 1944 included the Self Portrait with the annotation "sold" (copy, documentation center, van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
↑ The painting was included in a 1945 exhibition of works lent from private collections in Switzerland held at the Galerie Schulthess, Basel. It was also exhibited in the Kunsthalle Bern in 1946 as from a private collection from Bern.
↑ Acquisition date and source according to Whitney records in NGA curatorial files

Credit Line: Collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. He was not commercially successful, and his suicide at 37 came after years of mental illness, depression and poverty.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet, and thoughtful. As a young man he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a Protestant missionary in southern Belgium. He drifted in ill health and solitude before taking up painting in 1881, having moved back home with his parents. His younger brother Theo supported him financially, and the two kept a long correspondence by letter.

Although his career was brief, lasting a mere 10 years, Vincent van Gogh proved to be an exceptionally prolific and innovative artist. While he experimented with a variety of subjects—landscape, still life, portraiture—it is his self–portraits that have come to define him as an artist. Like his predecessor, Rembrandt van Rijn, Van Gogh was a devoted and probing practitioner of the art of self–portraiture. He painted no fewer than 36 self–portraits, undertaking his first forays just after his arrival in Paris in March 1886 and executing his last, culminant works during his stay at the asylum of Saint–Paul–de–Mausole in Saint–Rémy. The Washington canvas is one of the very last self–portraits Van Gogh painted.

During the first months of his voluntary internment at the asylum, the artist showed little interest in figure painting and concentrated instead upon the surrounding landscape. But in early July 1889 while painting in the fields near the asylum, Van Gogh suffered a severe breakdown that could have been a symptom of epilepsy. Incapacitated for five weeks and greatly unnerved by the experience, the artist retreated to his studio, refusing to go out even to the garden. This painting is the first work he produced after recovering from that episode. In a letter to his brother Theo written in early September 1889, he observed:

They say—and I am very willing to believe it—that it is difficult to know yourself—but it isn't easy to paint yourself either. So I am working on two portraits of myself at this moment—for want of another model—because it is more than time I did a little figure work. One I began the day I got up; I was thin and pale as a ghost. It is dark violet–blue and the head whitish with yellow hair, so it has a color effect. But since then I have begun another one, three quarter length on a light background.

This self–portrait is a particularly bold painting, apparently executed in a single sitting without later retouching. Here Van Gogh portrayed himself at work, dressed in his artist's smock with his palette and brushes in hand, a guise he had already adopted in two earlier self–portraits. While the pose itself and the intense scrutiny of the artist's gaze are hardly unique—one need but think of the occasionally uncompromising self–portraits of Rembrandt—the haunting and haunted quality of the image is distinct. The dark blue–violet of the smock and ground, the vivid orange of his hair and beard, create a startling contrast to the yellow and green of his face and heighten the gauntness of his features in a sallow complexion. The dynamic, even frenzied brushwork lends an uncommon immediacy and expressiveness to his portrayal. In its sheer intensity, it stands in sharp contrast to the other self–portrait he painted at the same time (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) in which the artist appears calmer and more self–possessed. Nevertheless, Van Gogh preferred the Washington painting as the one that captured his "true character."

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture

This is a Google Art Project image, thank you Google!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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