Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler)

Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in the summer of 1887, during his two years in Paris. Face and hat are built from short, side-by-side strokes of yellow, blue, orange and green — an echo of Neo-Impressionist technique, but quicker and more physical than the careful dots of Seurat. Before Paris, Van Gogh worked in somber browns. Contact with the Impressionists and with Japanese prints transformed his palette. Unable to afford models, he turned repeatedly to the mirror, producing more than twenty self-portraits in the city; this one shows the new language of broken color fully in play. The canvas has a second life: on its reverse is The Potato Peeler, painted in Nuenen in 1885. One support thus holds both the dark peasant realism of his Dutch years and the bright experimentation that followed.