Vincent Van Gogh

57.0 x 43.5 cm
Saint-Rémy,  September  1889
Washington: National Gallery of Art

                 I chose to write about this particular Portrait because in Portugal I made a copy of this work with oil pastels in A4 size, however I never did any research about the artist or the painting, and I never did a analysis about this work and I wanted to write about it because since I did the transcription the expression on his face in this portrait.

This is a painting, made with oil on canvas. This is a side view, in other words, we can see his profile. I think the artist spontaneously panted directly on the canvas, without any previous sketch. We can see rough and thick brush strokes in the same style of the famous paint The Starry Night (June 1889, Saint-Rémy) on the rigth, of this same Artist, we can see this mainly in the background and in his shoulder.

The left side of the paint is darker than the right side. We can see the light coming from the top right side, giving the idea of a lamp that could possibly be next to him or in the celling. We can see this by the light colours in his face and the white strokes in his shoulder.                                                                                                                                          

In this picture we can see a great variety of blues and violets. The blue emerge from the dark centre in the background like an abstract environment that surrounds him and the colours and tones of the hair and beard resembles to the moon in the The Starry Night paint. The background with warm violets; the cold blues on his clothes; the dark area around his head like a halo; the aggressive brush strokes; and the smile, that seems, to me, an ironic smile, gives a mood and atmosphere difficult to explain in words, almost suffocating, as if it was painted in a rush or despair.

Vincent Van Gogh, born in 30 March 1853, is Dutch impressionist (*) artist that is known by his landscapes and portraits works with his strong brush strokes. The Starry Night and Sunflowers are two of his famous paintings. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 in June of 1889, from a gunshot wound.

(*) Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists. The name of the style is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise),  is a known style by the vivid colours, thick application of paint, distinctive brush strokes, and real-life subject matter. Examples of impressionist artists are Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Auguste Renoir and many others.