What did Vincent van Gogh look like? Only one photograph of the artist exists, and in it he’s unrecognisable. At 19, the beard has not yet appeared; the familiar inverted triangle of his skull still goes incognito beneath the fleshiness of youth. Later, several of his friends would make portraits of him. But if we know him by his bristles in their pictures, he’s still several kinds of man.
Toulouse-Lautrec casts him in pastel with the far-off look of the absinthe drinker. In Pissarro’s sketch, in which he sits beside his top-hatted brother, Theo, he is almost (but not quite) the dandy. Gauguin famously has him at his easel, the sunflowers beside him doing nothing whatsoever to ease his mood, which is downcast, shuttered against the world. “It’s me all right, but me gone mad,” he is supposed to have said, on first seeing it.
Perhaps the better question, then, is to ask how Van Gogh saw himself – though it’s surely no easier to answer. At the Courtauld’s wondrous new exhibition, where a collection of the artist’s self-portraits are gathered together as if in a family album, the atmosphere is uncanny almost beyond description. A ghostliness is abroad in these rooms: here are the “apparitions” of which Van Gogh writes in his letters, the “modern” portrait having in his eyes more to do with a lingering vitality than with any photographic resemblance. But the eerie mood is cut with a clarity that goes through it like a knife. Have spectres ever been so corporeal, their bones, their flesh and even the colours of their eyes so infinitely varied?
Each time Van Gogh looked in the mirror, a different creature rose up before him, with the result that you might be in the company not of one man, but of a small crowd: a band of brothers. Only the fox-red hair gives the game away. That, and the feeling that this work represents some of those rare moments when, for the artist, “the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant”; that you are, in other words, in the presence of greatness.
The exhibition’s curator, Karen Serres, is keen to dispel the notion that Van Gogh’s self-portraits are displays of raw emotion. They are, she believes, as much demonstrations of technique as they are depictions of mood; the artist was his own best (and cheapest) model, and beyond this, and the details of where this or that picture was painted, she doesn’t say much.
I strongly favour this approach, and not only because one tires of the now highly commercialised mythology, all mutilated ears and laminated coasters. It was Van Gogh’s mental health – a madness that would descend like darkness – that stopped him from working; when he was painting, he was never, he felt, more sane. Nevertheless, these works reveal all sorts of signs of extreme feeling.
Van Gogh used a brilliant metaphor to explain the relationship between his art and his illness: knowing it could strike again at any time spurred him on, he said, “to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does”. It’s not feverishness, exactly, that we detect here. He’s too deft for that, and too innovative; he’s a minimalist in the sense that he knows just when to stop. But it is intense, this conviction (in his talent) that sometimes flickers, and sometimes blazes. It’s not only his eyes, as deep-set as boreholes, that bring to mind a sense of excavation.
There are 37 surviving self-portraits, all of which were made between the spring of 1886 and the early autumn of 1889 (Van Gogh killed himself, aged 37, in July 1890). This exhibition has 16 of them, as well as two other pictures from 1888: Van Gogh’s Chair, in which the artist is represented by his pipe and tobacco pouch, and Portrait of Eugene Boch, in which he depicts the Belgian painter against a starry sky (“I paint the infinite”), giving his friend the appreciation, the understanding, even the love he must often have craved for himself.
For the Courtauld, this is a great coup: here are some stunning loans. This is the first time in more than 130 years that two self-portraits of 1889, made when Van Gogh was in a psychiatric hospital (an asylum, as he would have known it) in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, have been reunited.
Painted only a week apart, the contrast between them is dramatic, completely gob-smacking. In the first, Van Gogh’s skin is yellow-green; there’s something feral about his expression, as if he were a sickly field mouse that has spied a particularly vigorous stoat. In the second, the light has come in. We see his brushes. He’s working, and the luxuriant folds of his smock suggest renewed energy. Art, Van Gogh’s most precious balm (“it fortifies the will and consequently allows these mental weaknesses less hold”), has performed its magic once again. I spent more time with these two works than with all the others combined. Taken together, there is something indomitable about them, and it does the soul good to see it.
But there’s fascination at every turn: the colours, the brushstrokes, the magnificent forehead. The earliest painting, Self-Portrait with Felt Hat (1886-87), comes with a whiff of the drawing room: the artist looks so serious, so bourgeois. But in Self-Portrait with Straw Hat (1887), made only a few months later, he appears before us like some old prog rocker decked out for his latest album cover.
Thinking about these pictures as a group, the obvious comparison – and the curator makes it – is with Van Gogh’s idol, Rembrandt (though his self-portraits were produced over decades). But I was put in mind of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck. It’s to do with scale, experimentation and, above all, a certain self-tenderness: a kindly honesty in the matter of what the eyes see.
And there’s something else, too. Like the show of Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Royal Academy in 2019, the Courtauld’s exhibition is small, staged over just two rooms. You could not possibly describe it – though there will be crowds – as a blockbuster, and for me this is one of the best things about it.
You will want, sometimes, to wrestle these great pictures from their heavy frames, as if releasing a prisoner from a cell. But this is an exhibition that wholly defies the terrible paradox of museum-going, which is that, in the case of very famous artists, it induces a kind of blindness. The eye is unharried, the legs are never weary. You have the time truly to see these pictures. Van Gogh and his inferno of a talent are palpable. For the rest of the day, your heart beats out a rhapsody.
Van Gogh: Self-Portraits is at the Courtauld Gallery, London, until 8 May
