In this series, the curatorial team presents one work from the Meural art library we find essential. (See all installments.)

What did van Gogh look like? More than most nearly every other artist, we should have quite a good idea—in just three years he painted over 30 self-portraits. And yet, the more of his self-portraits we look at, the less of an idea we seem to have of him. Are we to take one of his most famous as the truth? Or one that looks most like a real, knowable person? Or even one that matches our most recent image of van Gogh—Willem Dafoe, who played the artist in 2018’s At Eternity’s Gate? (In case you’re wondering, van Gogh just missed the proliferation of photography. There are a couple of photographs conjectured to be of the artist, but they are of dubious origin). But of course a self-portrait is not a mechanical reproduction of one’s physical appearance. As van Gogh himself said, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily, in order to express myself, more forcefully.”

So instead of choosing one painting, I choose to take them all together, with each working to highlight a unique aspect of the artist that can be isolated. In one we have his solemn despair, in another we have someone relatively anonymous, another is someone who doesn’t want to be seen, and another is, well, someone I don’t recognize as van Gogh at all. Because we have to highlight one work for this series, I’m going with Self-Portrait (1887) for its ambitious hues. Most of his self-portraits are drab in some detail or another, but in this work, van Gogh puts color to work everywhere he can: in his beard of course, but also his coat, and the spotty backdrop with a subtle horizontal gradient, and the shine of his forehead, and his eyes. I imagine this being created in one of the happier, more vibrant stretches of his life—a contrast to the biographical themes we’re often brought back to.

— Andrew Lipstein, Head of Editorial