The Changing Face of Vincent Van Gogh

It's really drawing the crowds, fully sold out for the next few weeks: Van Gogh Self-Portraits at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Van Gogh exhibitions aren't exactly thin on the ground, so is this one worth booking for? The answer is yes, very much so, because it assembles in one place for the first time almost half of his self-portraits, providing an exceptional opportunity to trace the development of Vincent's style over his short career on the basis of a single motif. 

There are 15 painted self-portraits on view; one is from the Courtauld itself, with four from the US and the rest from continental Europe. So for most of us, it's a chance to see paintings that you're possibly only vaguely familiar with, such as this one from Chicago, made in Paris in spring 1887. It's an attempt by van Gogh to put into practice the new pointillist technique developed by Georges Seurat. 

Instead of rigorously following Seurat's use of dots of pure colour, though, van Gogh varied his brushstrokes, rendering his hair and beard quite differently to his jacket and the bluish background. 

All these self-portraits were created over a very short timespan: the last four years of van Gogh's life, starting in 1886, when he moved to Paris to live with his art-dealer brother, Theo.  

The earliest work on show is from late 1886 to early 1887, and the palette is notably dark. It was only about 18 months since van Gogh had painted The Potato Eaters, perhaps the most famous picture he made before going to France, and if you've been to the Netherlands to see van Gogh's early work, you'll know how brown and earthy it is.

Now, in Paris, van Gogh was coming under the influence of the Impressionists, and here he was experimenting with ways of using light; the right-hand side of his face is strongly illuminated, while the other side is in deep shadow, rendered by the artist in tones of pink and green.

In this first room of the show, we see van Gogh's palette getting lighter and lighter. By the spring of 1887, there's a transformational change in a vibrantly coloured picture from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the eastern Netherlands, as if van Gogh had gone from a funeral to a wedding.

Van Gogh often looks rather haggard in his self-portraits; his cheeks were gaunt, mouth closed, hiding his missing teeth. What's behind those piercing eyes and that unsettling image? Can we look into the mind of the man who produced beautiful works like the multiple versions of the Sunflowers but was also a very troubled character, prone to blazing rows and simmering confrontations. One friend noted, though, that John Peter Russell's realist portrait of Vincent (not on display here) was perhaps a better likeness.  

In the second and final room of the show, we get to see some more familiar images, including van Gogh as the artist at work, from the end of his stay in Paris and his move to the sun and warmth of the south of France in early 1888. 

Here's Vincent in a straw hat, embodying his commitment to painting directly in the landscape; he would make day trips from the capital to paint the surroundings. This is the persona picked up by Kirk Douglas when he played the painter in Lust for Life.  

The paintings are arranged chronologically in the first room, but the logic goes a bit awry in the second, perhaps to adapt to the wall space. We see a growing confidence in van Gogh's ability to handle paint. In late 1887, he changed the way his self-portraits were structured; previously his brushstrokes had followed the curves of his face, but in a Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the brushstrokes radiate out from his nose, and a halo effect is created around his head. 

Something similar is going on in this picture from the Musée d'Orsay, with the blue, almost turquoise, lines around the eyes adding emphasis. Van Gogh's friend Emile Bernard called these pictures "fiery faces", and they were the first of his self-portraits to be exhibited to the public, in Montmartre in November 1887.   

One of the last paintings van Gogh made before quitting Paris was this ambitious work, showing himself at an easel. The colours on Vincent's palette are the ones he used to paint the picture. 

The next work follows a hiatus of nearly a year, and it's the Courtauld's own Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear from January 1889. Van Gogh painted it a week after being released from hospital following his mutilation of his left ear; it appears to be his right ear in the picture, because he painted it from a mirror image. 

A few months later, van Gogh entered a psychiatric hospital, and the final two self-portraits in this exhibition are from the end of the summer of 1889, as he resumed working in an attempt to improve his mental health. The first one is this rather uplifting depiction of himself as the painter in action, looking apparently rather confidently towards his canvas, his damaged ear hidden from view. 

Right next to it, and right by the exit from the show, is a very different painting, and only recently securely attributed to Van Gogh. It was made just a week before the blue picture above, and displays a gaunt, troubled individual. 

Quite a harrowing image. And, perhaps, a cue to cast Benedict Cumberbatch as Vincent in any forthcoming remake of Lust for Life. 

There are two more paintings on display; one of them Van Gogh's Chair in Arles from the National Gallery, a picture the curators suggest is also a coded self-portrait. 

This is a rewarding show, but it's fairly minimalist; a rather traditional presentation with informative captions that leave you to study the paintings. Unlike the Wallace Collection's recent, similarly-sized review of Frans Hals's male portraits, there are no add-ons in the shape of audio commentary to take you deeper into and beyond the subject matter. We were in and out in just under an hour, in an exhibition space whose small proportions surprised us, given the Courtauld's recent revamp. It's cramped in there; book a ticket now to avoid disappointment. 

Practicalities

Van Gogh Self-Portraits is on at the Courtauld Gallery in London until May 8. It's open daily from 1000 to 1800. Tickets for the exhibition and the rest of the Courtauld cost £16 on a weekday, £18 at weekends (£2 more including a Gift Aid donation) and need to be booked online in advance here. If that sounds quite a lot for a relatively small exhibition, it only amounts to £7 on top of the admission price to the Courtauld's own collection. The gallery is located within Somerset House on the Strand, to the south of Aldwych. The closest Tube stations are Temple on the District and Circle lines and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly, and many bus routes stop nearby. 

While you're at the Courtauld

The collection is home to some of the most familiar images in late 19th-century French painting. Most famously, there's Edouard Manet's perspective-defying Bar at the Folies-Bergère. But also not to be missed are Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theatre Box), which was shown at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; one of Paul Cézanne's versions of The Card Players; and less well-known but unforgettable, the Young Woman Powdering Herself, Seurat's pointillist portrait of his mistress, Madeleine Knobloch. 

Images

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, spring 1887, The Art Institute of Chicago

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Felt Hat, December 1886-January 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, August-September 1887, The Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, autumn 1887, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait as a Painter, December 1887-February 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, September 1889, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, late August 1889, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo