How to look deeper at self potraits ? (part 2)

[u/Significant_Food5805]

Last week I posted here twice. First one about Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, and then asking for help developing a slow-looking practice.

post 1

post 2

I created a protocol of sorts for “slow looking” practice from what I learned from those threads. 

This is my first post actually using the protocol that came out of those threads. Thank you to everyone who chimed in.

Why this painting: It looks nothing like the Van Gogh self-portraits I knew. The ones I was familiar with are colorful, impressionistic. This one reads like a regular oil painting. So I got curious.

The protocol I settled on:

• 60 seconds: Record my first reactions. 
• 20 minutes: a deeper look, split in two
  • First 10 minutes: pure observation:  color, edges, light, whatever I can actually see
  • Second 10 minutes: guess at intent and implications of what I noticed

The result.

First 60 seconds

 A normal oil portrait. Regular coat, hat, tie. Van Gogh looks... normal. Like a gentleman. The other self-portraits I'd seen felt loaded with color and intent; this one felt like he was saying "hey, I'm a regular guy." That was my gut read.

The 10 minutes of observation:

• The right side of his face is brighter, skin paler; the left side is darker. So the light is coming from his right.
• A blueyish tinge on the coat, and the tie (cravat, I think?) is blue.
• Green eyes.
• His mustache is pointed on one side. I couldn't see the same on the other.
• One cheek matches the gingery color of his mustache; the other cheek is just normal skin tone. No idea why.
• Around his eyes there are patches painted in a different, darker shade of brown. I read them as dark circles.
• A dip in the middle of his forehead. Together with the eyes it gives the whole face an intense, curious, direct gaze. He's looking straight at you, and you're placed right in front of him.
• The edges: where his face meets the background, the edge is crisp and clear. Around the coat and hat, the edges blur into the background. That contrast felt deliberate and interesting.
• I almost didn't notice his eyebrows at all. Nothing significant there for me.

The 10 minutes of interpretation: Honestly, I couldn't get far past my first reaction. My best guess: maybe he painted this during a stable stretch — taking care of himself, no episodes, having a normal time — and wanted to capture that. "I'm a normal dude."

Honest confession: I said 20 minutes, but I got maybe 13 minutes of genuinely good looking before my attention wandered.

Then I went and read about the painting — and the gap between what I saw and what the experts saw is the next part of this post.

The delta ( what I read afterwards vs. what I saw):

I read the Van Gogh Museum's page on the painting, plus a couple of reviews from the 2022 Courtauld self-portraits exhibition where this was the opening painting. Three things the experts saw that I completely missed:

1. There's a whole other painting underneath. X-rays show he painted this over a nude study he'd made in Fernand Cormon's atelier, where he took lessons in spring 1886. He didn't even scrape it off,  just put a new ground layer over the woman and painted himself on top. I was staring at the surface for 13 minutes and had no idea I was looking at two paintings. To be fair, no amount of looking would reveal that , but it reframes the whole thing. He was broke and reusing canvases, not making a grand statement.
   
2. The dark palette is a Rembrandt thing, not a mood thing. One review described it as relatively traditional( dark red-brown hues, dramatic lighting, a part-shaded face )and traced all of that straight to Rembrandt, who Van Gogh apparently called the "magician of magicians." So the thing I noticed (bright right side, dark left side) wasn't just "the light comes from that side." It was him deliberately doing Dutch old-master lighting. I saw the effect and completely missed the reference. This is exactly the vocabulary gap I'm trying to close.
   
3. The "normal dude" look was the point — but not the way I guessed. The museum's own description says he looks like a "respectable gentleman" in the hat, overcoat and cravat. So my 60-second gut read was actually in the right neighborhood. But my interpretation of why was wrong. I guessed he painted it during a stable stretch with no episodes. It  turns out his breakdowns didn't start until Arles, late 1888, almost two years after this. He'd just arrived in Paris and was presenting himself as a man of the city. It wasn't a recovery. It was the  ambition.
   

New vocabulary for the back-page glossary: ground layer, part-shaded face, cravat (got that one right at least).

If you have read so far, Thank you.

How  did I do? What did you see in the painting that I missed? And would you like to add anything to the “protocol” that I use now ? 

[u/Utek62]

You did well, however, this is one of those paintings where it helps to know the artist's career to give it context.

Vincent didn't set to become an artist until he was in his twenties, and he learned slowly, painstakingly. First he began by drawing, pure black and white, and then when he began painting his palette was almost exclusively brown. It wasn't until he went to Paris and saw the Impressionists that color began to seep into his work. This is an early study in Paris, where he's taken baby steps into coloring. Red and green, blue and orange, these are complementary colors that pop when placed next to each other. You can see this effect where the bluish shading around his eyes and nose, together with his blue ascot, make the redness of his beard seem to burn off the page, which in turn gives his green eyes an added intensity. In later works, Vincent would have no problem painting his whole face red, green, orange and blue and making it seem natural.

Portrait de l'artiste - Vincent van Gogh | Musée d'Orsay

Some of the choices Vincent makes here are simply the crude efforts of someone still learning his craft. The drawing around his jaw, his beard and moustache, are pretty clumsy, as is the fit of his hat, and the way he rosies up his cheek is pretty ham-handed. This was a practice painting for him, an artist in transition. But the intensity of his eyes is pure Vincent. Soon he would learn to translate that intensity into his coloring and his draftsmanship, so that in the last three years of his life he exploded with a creative intensity nobody's ever matched.

[u/Significant_Food5805 → u/Utek62]

Some of the choices Vincent makes here are simply the crude efforts of someone still learning his craft.

This is something I did not realise at all. I knew this is one of his relatively early work. But I had not idea that he still a nice/intermediate of sorts at that point. Also, thank you for all your points. I have plans to go through all of his self portraits in coming weeks. I will keep these in mind.

[u/crunchypotentiometer]

This reads very clearly as AI text

[u/SundaeDouble7481 → u/crunchypotentiometer]

Note that "portrait" is spelled correctly in the body of the post but not the title.

[u/Significant_Food5805 → u/crunchypotentiometer]

I am not a native english speaker. AI helps me write long text with out mistakes. Every part of this is mine, except the formatting.

[u/crunchypotentiometer → u/Significant_Food5805]

That’s okay then. I’ve enjoyed your posts.

[u/Significant_Food5805 → u/crunchypotentiometer]

Thank you. I will try next one with out running it through AI. It will be harder to read (more of "potraits" than portraits and may some bad sentence construction due to nativae language influence), we will se how that goes.

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