Van Gogh Self Portraits

 Van Gogh Self Portraits

 

My overwhelming feeling was of sadness. Here was such a bold and innovative artist, destined to influence C20 painters like none other. Here was such a depressed, unhappy, and desperate young man. Genius may have been flowing through Van Gogh’s brush, but it was no solace.

 

The curators of the exhibition in the newly restored Courtauld Gallery urge the visitor to see this unique assembly of 15 self portraits as demonstrating Van Gogh’s extraordinary exploration of techniques and colour, producing many astonishing and vibrant, but contrasting, studies of the same model- himself.

 

This is a valid and important perspective to hold. There’s pointillism;

there’s Van Gogh’s face pushed through a psychedelic spider’s web;

there are the wonderfully bold brushstrokes and magnificent colours of his later style.

 

But the similarity of subject matter, if not of treatment, brings the viewer closer to the artist-model’s illness and despair. Van Gogh saw portraiture as one of the important branches of painting – the artist should draw out the essence of the sitter.

 

“Ah! Portraiture, portraiture with the thought, the soul of the model in it, that is what I think must come.”

 

This is all very true when contemplating the multiple “Van Goghs” in the portraits here. There is no smile in the eyes or on the mouths. No satisfied pride in the gazes. There’s a haunted defiance: an absence of self pity.

 

Only in the last portrait (which for many years was not attributed to Van Gogh) did I detect a furtiveness, as in a very sick man trying to avoid too much scrutiny – by himself.

 

March 2022