One portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh has survived. It was taken when he was nineteen, before he had painted anything. Every other face anybody has of him he made himself, more than thirty-five times, and he began doing it seriously in Paris for a reason that had nothing to do with vanity.
The cheapest model in Paris
He arrived in 1886 to stay with his brother Theo, and what he wanted was to get better at painting people. People cost money. Short of it and short of sitters, he used the face that was always in the room: over twenty-five of the self-portraits were made in those two Paris years. He bought a mirror on purpose for the job.
To save more, he sometimes painted a head on the back of a canvas he had already used, which spared him the model and the canvas at once. Five of those are in the Van Gogh Museum, and in July 2022 another turned up in Edinburgh, hidden under glue and card on the back of a different painting and found by X-ray.
He told Theo the logic himself: if he could get the colouring of his own head right, he would manage other people's heads after that.
What Paris did to the colour
This one is from 1887 and it is small — forty-one centimetres by thirty-two and a half, painted on prepared board rather than canvas. He had come out of Holland working in browns.
In Paris he saw what Seurat was doing with separated dots of pure colour, and the head here is built out of short strokes laid side by side: green, blue, red, orange, none of them mixed down into mud. What Seurat intended as a cool scientific method, Van Gogh used to make a face vibrate.
The eyes are the steadiest thing in it. He once told Theo he would rather paint people's eyes than cathedrals, however solemn the cathedrals were. Five years was the whole of his working life as a painter, and this is roughly the middle of it.
Why there are so many
The self-portraits are the reason the face is recognisable at all. They say he had red hair, green eyes and a narrow bony head, and no two of them agree about the man behind it. He is grave in most of them, and concentrating.
He described the last one he made in Paris as quite unkempt and sad, something like the face of death, which is roughly how he felt by then. He left for Arles a few weeks afterwards and had fifteen months there.
They have been reproduced so often since that they built the whole idea of the artist as a wrecked genius, which is a great deal of weight for a man who was mostly trying to practise heads without paying anybody.
One photograph, taken at nineteen, and more than thirty-five paintings. The face everybody pictures is the one he did himself, for free.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.