In 1886 Van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris, where his brother Theo, an art dealer, took him in. In two years he went from the dark browns of his Dutch peasant paintings to a bright, broken-up color that owed a lot to the artists he met there.
This self-portrait, painted in 1887, shows the change. The background and the straw hat are made of short, separate strokes, in the manner of the Neo-Impressionists such as Seurat and Signac, who were putting small marks of pure color side by side. Van Gogh uses the method with more energy than they did, so the strokes seem to radiate around his head, with blue and orange pushing against each other.
He painted himself dozens of times in Paris, partly because he could not afford to pay models. A mirror was free. The portraits became his way of trying out each new idea about color and brushwork.
There is another picture on the back of this canvas. Van Gogh often reused his canvases, and the reverse of the Metropolitan Museum's painting carries an earlier work, The Potato Peeler, from his Dutch period. The painting that shows the fresh Paris color is literally built on the old brown one.
Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat appears on our: