#Van gogh portraits full

A true artist, Van Gogh said, must do more than “hold a mirror up”. Photographic portrait studios were popping up all over in the mid-1880s, forcing portrait painters to consider what they had to offer.

This was what Van Gogh wanted his portraiture to do – to transcend. The Dutch Old Master had proved himself “a poet, that is to say a creator”, Van Gogh said, and even in the necessarily more “true to life” group portrait of Drapers’ Guild officials, The Syndics (1662), Van Gogh saw Rembrandt raising the image “into the … infinite”. Van Gogh visited the newly opened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1885 and wrote to his brother Theo describing in minute detail the colouring of a figure by Frans Hals, and eulogising Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride (1665-9). Relatively traditional in its execution, its dark red-brown hues, dramatic lighting and part-shaded face owe much to the fellow countryman Van Gogh called the “magician of magicians”, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69). The show starts with Self-Portrait with Felt Hat (1886). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Felt Hat (1886-1887). Yet they are very varied – in style, presentation and purpose. None is known before this time, nor after September 1889. In just three-and-a-half years following his arrival in Paris in spring 1886, Van Gogh painted 35 self-portraits.

#Van gogh portraits full

Owner of the only Van Gogh self-portrait to reside in the UK, Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear (1889), the Courtauld has imported works from the US, France, Norway, the Netherlands and Switzerland to allow us to range across the full span of the artist’s work in the genre.

Just a stone’s throw from his Covent Garden workplace and the Strand print shops he frequented when he lived in London, he is spectacularly present at the Courtauld’s excellent exhibition of his self-portraits. Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) is back in town. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, summer 1887 (detail). Van Gogh Self-Portraits Vincent van Gogh’s green-blue eyes stare into ours as we look with him and at him in this intense exhibition of nearly half his painted self-portraits