PROTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
BY VINCENT VAN GOGH
"PROTRAIT OF THE ARTIST" (25.6"/19.6" inches) oil on canvas, Painted by VINCENT VAN GOGH in 1888 (Paris). Collected by V. W. van Gogh, Laren.
WHILE in Paris, VAN GOGH produced twenty two portraits in a period of less than two years, twice as many as he was to paint in the next & last two years of his life. Compared to Rembrandt's sixty or more in forty years, VAN GOGH'S repeated self portrayal is astonishing, & all the more so beside the Impressionist gaiety & outwardness of most of his Paris paintings.
Illness & quarrels & a confict between the demands of the new art & deeply rooted personal values, important in his earlier & later work, threw him back upon himself. In some of his portraits we see a profoundly earnest, troubled face, searching & struggling for its path.
This one, the last of his Parisian self portraits, is the masterpiece of the series & a résumé of what he had learned in those two years. Painted largely in shadow, it is luminous throughout, with its greatest mass of rich colour the blue in shadow, the same reds & greens appear in shadows and full light. The greenish tone brings out the intensity of the beard & overcasts the contracted brooding features, the most shadowy region of the work.
The con trast of light & shade, like that of red & green, evokes a contrast within the personality, evident in the difference between the two sides of the face the darker, more depressed side blocked by the high canvas, the lighter, more active & open, dominating its space & surmounting the palette and hand, with their freer play of reds & greens & the two dark cups like the eyes.
The major chords of yellow & blue, green and red, interweave & circulate throughout the. pected recurrence-an imaginative use of colour beyond technique or rules. The dosage of tiny, contrasting spots a lesson of the Neo Impressionists, applied freely, without doctrinaire spirit creates a varied surface forms, the background is treated, with no loss of luminosity, in a more traditional space in unex pattern & accents the way.
Within the firmly built massive whole is an undercurrent of restless feeling, the powerful diagonals of the palette & brushes, tied to the easel & stretcher, are parts of an irregular network, including the broken diagonals of the smock. All these lines contribute to the expression of the head, which has similar, closely joined, angular forms & looks rounded only against the sharper angularity below.
VINCENT VAN GOGH PAINTINGS