Van Gogh\'s \"Self-Portrait With a Straw Hat\"

Van Gogh's "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat" (1887)

With an oeuvre of over 2000 works Van Gogh's artistic passion matched the intensity of his religious fervor. Religion and art were, essentially, the basis of Van Gogh's life. And the history of his life is, in a way, a history of modern Europe; in another way it is a history of the prelude to 20th century modern art; and in another way it is a lesson on the loss that Europe had suffered when it broke with its religious heritage and embarked on a course of Industrialization. This paper will discuss the meaning of Van Gogh's 1887 Self-Portrait and how it reflects deeper passions within Van Gogh -- passions that ran contrary to the modernization going on around him.

Religion was always very important to Van Gogh, and though the subject may seem incidental in his self-portraits, the sheer fact that he painted so many portraits of himself reveals a kind of fastidiousness in his person, which might be described as religious. Indeed, Van Gogh spent most of his youth attempting to pursue a spiritual course. When that finally failed, he took to art and devoted the rest of his life to capturing the mysterious wonder that he saw all around him.

However, his self-portraits reveal a struggle within himself: they show a man with a kind of haunted and hunted expression. The 1887 Self-Portrait (one of nearly three dozen completed over his brief career) was composed just before he cut off his own ear in a fit of madness while staying at the now famous Yellow House with Paul Gauguin. Here, one sees a troubled look in the artist's eyes, and the brush strokes all seem to point to the fierceness of those eyes, as though the pain that Van Gogh felt in his soul were radiating outward from his eyes in the colorful brushstrokes on the canvas.

As Jan Hulsker notes, "every color used to paint Van Gogh's person and clothing finds its pair in his surroundings." The colors of course unify schematically the subject (Van Gogh) with the surroundings -- but in another sense, one can view the 1887 Self-Portrait as an attempt by the artist to see himself as one who finally -- disfigured fit in with the world which had no place for him. Here he now saw himself clearly, wholly, and directly -- and the portrait that he produced is both cold and warm, negative and positive, troubled and yet content.

The picture, obviously, is not directly about any of society's problems at the times. But some of the problems may be inferred by the subject, which is the artist himself. Here he is in his straw hat -- a sign of the countryside that drew him away from Paris, where he spent some time learning the art of the Impressionists, falling in love, and painting various city scenes. This picture was painted during his Parisian sojourn. It is, however, forward looking -- the eyes propel the viewer to some distant sight, unseen, off canvas and perhaps in the future. Perhaps this future object is what is really at the heart of the self-portrait: some manifestation of the wonder of the world not found in the developing city. Van Gogh's gaze is surrounded by the swirling and violent-seeming yellows, and his face is lined with streaks of white, gray, yellow, and orange. He is clearly thin, as though from some sort of religious fasting, and the bright straw hat may even symbolize a kind of artistic halo, newly won during his time in the art capital of the world.

Yet, here in his self-portrait, one may clearly see that Van Gogh's spirit was now alive with an intensity that was as bright and fervent as his religious soul had been a decade earlier. He had adopted a way to communicate what he had always felt -- an impression about life. Now that he had it, he could look back to those parts of the world he had previously explored during his days of religious fervor. Now he could return to them with an artistic fervor. Indeed, art appears to be radiating from out of his mind in the Self-Portrait. As a matter of fact, his heart was not content to stay in the city of Paris: thus he traveled to Arles to study and paint the scenes and images that had inspired The Potato Eaters -- only now the same scenes and settings would be bright, alive, soulful -- and overwhelming.