For 50 years, a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh was called a fake due to its apparent break from form. Now, experts from the Van Gogh Museum believe the painting might be the only known work by the addled artist completed in the throes of psychosis.
The painting, from 1889, features the Dutch artist’s visage in muted hues of green and tan — a break from his usually vibrant blues and yellows. His face is looking askance from a three-quarter turn, as if giving a side-eye to the audience. Since 1970, scholars have disputed its authenticity, claiming it lacked key elements and details of origin inherent in van Gogh’s other works.
The portrait has been in the collection of Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet since 1910. In 2006, researchers discovered the picture had once belonged to two friends of the artist, Joseph and Marie Ginoux, who lived in Arles, France. It’s not known how the painting ended up in their hands, nor where the work was completed: Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, or Auvers-sur-Oise.
But in 2014, the Nasjonalmuseet invited Amsterdam’s van Gogh experts back to pick up the study, and they have now determined the painting is “unmistakably” his work — finished while the artist was in an asylum suffering a psychotic break.
The artist’s illness lasted from mid-July 1889 until Sept. 1. A clue to the portrait’s provenance can be found in letters from van Gogh during this time. In one dated Aug. 22, while the painter was in a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy, he wrote that he was still “disturbed” but well enough to start painting again. In another, written to his brother Theo on Sept. 20, he references a painting that is “an attempt from when I was ill.” These details led experts to assume the painting was completed in the 10 days following the August letter, which would predate his other 1889 self-portraits in Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
Experts say this is the only work that can be traced back to one of the artist’s psychotic episodes.
“Although van Gogh was frightened to admit at that point that he was in a similar state to his fellow residents at the asylum, he probably painted this portrait to reconcile himself with what he saw in the mirror: a person he did not wish to be, yet was,” Louis van Tilborgh, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, said in a statement. “This is part of what makes the painting so remarkable and even therapeutic.”
The work is currently on display at the Van Gogh Museum and included in their upcoming exhibition “In the Picture,” beginning Feb. 21.