Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (obverse: The Potato Peeler)

When it was painted

In March 1886, Van Gogh turned up in Paris without warning. He sent a note to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer, asking to meet him at the Louvre. The two brothers ended up sharing a home, and soon moved to an apartment on the rue Lepic, high on the hill of Montmartre.

Vincent turned thirty-four in 1887, the year of this portrait. Back in the Dutch countryside he had painted farm workers in dark, heavy colors, and The Potato Peeler on the back of this canvas comes from that time. In Paris he spent a few months in the studio of the painter Fernand Cormon, where he met younger artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Émile Bernard. He looked hard at the Impressionists and at the dotted pictures of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He also collected Japanese woodblock prints. His colors grew much brighter.

Money stayed tight. Theo paid the bills, and Vincent sold almost nothing. Models cost money, so the cheapest sitter in Paris was the face in his own mirror. He painted more than twenty self-portraits in his two Paris years. Flipping an old canvas instead of buying a new one came from the same budget.

Sharing a home was hard, too. Vincent was stubborn and quick to argue. A letter survives in which Theo told their sister Wil how difficult life with his brother had become. In February 1888, Vincent left for Arles in the south of France, chasing stronger light.

Decades later, this small canvas belonged to the American collector Adelaide Milton de Groot, and it came to the Metropolitan Museum through her bequest in 1967. Look at the picture again. Just behind that bright yellow hat, on the other side of the cloth, a woman peels potatoes, painted in dark, earthy tones. One canvas holds both painters he was, two years apart.