Self-Portrait
A dark-haired, disembodied head of a haloed man with pale, peach skin floats against a red and yellow background in this vertical portrait. The man’s hair seems to be flattened against his forehead, and extends beyond his head at the back in a way that suggests it may become a cap or hood. His face turns toward us, and he looks down to our left under arched eyebrows. He has a prominent hooked nose and a brushy mustache. Behind his head, the background is divided into a tomato-red zone for the top half and a golden yellow field below, separated by a thin, pine-green line. Two red and green apples hang from a branch near the upper right corner. The thin yellow halo floats over his head to the left of the branch. A pine-green, stylized, vine-like form curves up from the bottom edge of the panel and ends with flat, sunshine yellow, square shapes, perhaps abstracted flowers or fruit. A hand near the lower right holds one end of the vine like a cigarette between fingertips. The vine seems to turn into a serpent’s head beyond the man’s fingers. Numbers and letters are painted in green in the lower left: “1889” and “P Go.”
Colors in this work
Details
- Artist
- Paul Gauguin
- Date
- 1889
- Medium
- oil on wood
- Dimensions
- overall: 79.2 x 51.3 cm (31 3/16 x 20 3/16 in.)
- Department
- CF
- Holding institution
- National Gallery of Art
- Palette
-
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- Image provider
- national-gallery-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Chester Dale Collection
Art Genome Taxonomy
12 tags
Subject Matter
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Self-Portrait Both · 99%
The catalog title identifies the work as Self-Portrait, and the image visibly presents a single, prominently rendered human head as the central subject.
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Face Visual · 99%
The enlarged face, including the eyes, nose, mustache, mouth, and surrounding hair, dominates the composition.
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Food Both · 99%
Two apples are visibly depicted near the upper right, and the museum description specifically identifies them as apples.
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Text Both · 99%
Green numerals and lettering, including the date 1889 and the artist’s initials, are visible at the lower left; the catalog description confirms this inscription.
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Symbolic Composition Interpretive · 73%
The unusual juxtaposition of a halo-like elliptical ring, fruit, looping vine- or serpent-like forms, a hand, and an inscription suggests a deliberately symbolic rather than purely naturalistic arrangement, without establishing a specific meaning.
Visual Qualities
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Bright and Vivid Colors Visual · 97%
The painting uses strongly contrasting tomato red, golden yellow, green, peach, and dark blue-black passages across broad areas of the composition.
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Flatness Visual · 94%
Broad fields of relatively even color, simplified forms, and emphatic outlines compress spatial depth and give the image a strongly graphic, flattened appearance.
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Contour Line Visual · 96%
Dark, assertive lines define the hair, facial features, apples and stems, looping green forms, clothing, and other shapes.
Medium and Techniques
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Oil Painting Metadata · 99%
The museum catalog records the medium as oil on wood.
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Oil on Panel Metadata · 93%
The catalog specifies oil applied to a wooden support, corresponding to the panel-based oil-painting category.
Time Periods
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19th Century Art Both · 99%
The work is dated 1889 in the museum record, placing it within nineteenth-century art.
Materials
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Wood Metadata · 99%
The catalog identifies the support as wood.
Source & rights
Paul Gauguin. Self-Portrait. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
High-resolution sources
- IIIF image service ↗ 6,852 × 10,663 · National Gallery Of Art · Available