Self-Portrait (1887)

This Self-Portrait shows its maker at the turning point of his art: he has traded the dark earth tones of his Dutch years for the stippled strokes and bright palette of Neo-Impressionism, and he studies his own sharpened face with the same probing attention he gave his sitters. Vincent van Gogh painted it in Paris in 1887; he made more than twenty self-portraits in the French capital, and this one, in which the beard is newly grown and the eyes look out with fierce directness, captures the artist mid-transformation — the man who had learned from Seurat and the Impressionists and was about to become himself. The picture was kept by the artist’s family until it entered the Art Institute, the first van Gogh self-portrait to reach an American collection.