Van Gogh Face to Face

The Portraits

Essays by Roland Dom, George S. Keyes, Joseph J. Rishel with Katherine Sachs, George T.M. Shackelford, Lauren Soth, and Judy Sund

A month before his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his sister, “What impassions me most much, much more than all the rest of my métier is the portrait, the modern portrait.” In the course of his short, intense career he revolutionized portrait painting, decisively influencing its course in the twentieth century.

Published to accompany a major touring exhibition, this book brings together for the first time the great portraits from all periods of the painter’s life. The story begins with the extraordinary and relatively unknown body of vivid, carefully executed drawings of orphans and paupers produced in The Hague when he was a young man. It continues with van Gogh’s time in Paris, where the influence of Impressionism, Japanese art, and contemporaries like Gauguin and Bernard led him to produce some of his most famous images: Portrait of Père Tanguy (1887), Self-Portrait with Gray Felt Hat (1887), and Self-Portrait as an Artist (1887-88), to name a few. And it culminates with such penetrating masterpieces as Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1889) and Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), created in Arles, St.-Rémy, and Auvers immediately before and after the artist’s devastating final breakdown.

Each work is beautifully reproduced and set in context by leading scholars. Individually, their essays focus on particular groups of work, shedding new light on van Gogh’s aims and methods. Collectively, they establish the centrality of portraiture to his œuvre. The result is nothing less than a wholly original way of looking at van Gogh-an unprecedented and wonderfully revealing view of his enduring achievement as an artist.

With 228 illustrations, 204 in color