The Van Gogh self portrait 1887 sitting in front of you right now does not look like the work of the same man who painted dark Dutch peasants just two years earlier. The grey felt hat sits at a slight angle, the brushstrokes pulse with a newly discovered energy, and the color choices reflect a complete overhaul of technique. This particular self-portrait from his first year in Paris marks the moment when Vincent transformed himself from a provincial painter of somber interiors into an artist fluent in the language of French modernism. He did not simply change his subject matter or palette. He used his own face as a laboratory.
Twenty-Two Experiments in Identity
Van Gogh painted more than twenty self-portraits during 1887 alone, an astonishing number that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with economy. Models cost money he did not have. His own reflection cost nothing. Each canvas became a testing ground for the techniques flooding into his consciousness through his brother Theo's gallery, through conversations with fellow painters like Emile Bernard and Paul Signac, and through direct observation of Impressionist and Pointillist works he had only read about in Holland. The Van Gogh Paris self portrait series documents not a stable identity but a deliberately unstable one, an artist remaking himself stroke by stroke.
Self-portrait 1 from this period shows him wearing the grey felt hat that appears in several 1887 works, a detail that helps distinguish this canvas from others painted that same year. The hat functions as more than mere headwear. It signals urban sophistication, a deliberate departure from the rough peasant caps of his Dutch period. The background holds a distinct quality of color application that reveals which new technique he was testing. Some 1887 self-portraits show clear Pointillist dots in the background, inspired by Georges Seurat. Others display looser, Impressionist color mixing. This particular work captures the transition, with visible directional strokes that suggest movement away from blended realism toward something more optically adventurous.
The Van Gogh Pointillist Technique and Its Limits
The Van Gogh pointillist technique never achieved the scientific precision of Seurat's method, and this painting demonstrates exactly why. Where Seurat placed each dot according to color theory calculations, Van Gogh used the approach as a starting point, then let his natural intensity take over. Look closely at the background treatment in this self-portrait. The strokes do not sit in patient, uniform dots. They push and pull, creating a sense of atmospheric vibration that has more to do with emotional temperature than optical science. His beard receives similar treatment, with individual strokes of orange, red, and blue sitting side by side rather than blending into a single brown mass.
This technical restlessness reflects the Van Gogh artistic transformation 1887 at its most visible. He absorbed influences rapidly but could not sustain the patience required by pure Pointillism. By the end of the year, he had already moved beyond it, taking the brightness and color separation but abandoning the methodical application. The self-portraits from this period function as a visual diary of these technical pivots. Compared to Flowers in a Blue Vase, painted the same year, you can see the same experimental energy applied to different subject matter, the same willingness to let color carry emotional weight rather than simply describe surfaces.
Why did Van Gogh paint so many self portraits in 1887?
The practical answer remains the most accurate one. Vincent could not afford to pay models during his Paris years, when he depended entirely on Theo's financial support. But the deeper answer reveals an artist who understood that technical mastery required repetition. A portrait demands attention to skin tones, to the structure of a face, to the challenge of capturing both physical likeness and psychological presence. By using himself as the perpetual subject, Van Gogh could focus entirely on how he applied paint rather than who he was painting. The face became secondary to the method.
This approach separated him from artists who painted self-portraits primarily as acts of self-examination or self-promotion. Van Gogh certainly cared about how he appeared, but these 1887 works prioritize technique over introspection. The grey felt hat appears again and again not because it held deep symbolic meaning but because it provided a consistent compositional element while he varied everything else. One day he would test complementary color contrasts in the background. Another day he would experiment with directional brushwork in the jacket. The hat stayed the same so the experiments could change.
From Dutch Darkness to French Light
The Van Gogh self portrait analysis of this particular 1887 work must acknowledge what it replaced. Just two years earlier, Van Gogh had painted Head of a Peasant with Pipe, a work rooted in earth tones and heavy shadows. That painting valued moral weight and social realism. This 1887 self-portrait values color relationships and surface energy. The transformation did not happen gradually. Paris accelerated everything. Within months of arriving in the city, Vincent had lightened his palette, thinned his paint application in some areas while thickening it in others, and begun treating the canvas surface as a field of optical activity rather than a window into three-dimensional space.
The grey felt hat self-portrait captures this shift at a specific moment. The face still retains some modeling and dimensional structure, showing his academic training had not been completely abandoned. But the background refuses depth. It sits flat, pulsing with color rather than receding into atmospheric space. This tension between old skills and new ambitions gives the painting its particular character. Van Gogh had not yet arrived at the swirling, expressive style of his later Self-portrait 2 from 1888, but he had definitively left his Dutch period behind.
What Technique Did Van Gogh Use in His 1887 Self Portraits?
The answer changes depending on which 1887 self-portrait you examine, and that instability is precisely the point. Self-portrait 1 demonstrates a hybrid approach: directional brushwork in the background that suggests Impressionist influence, more controlled strokes in the facial features that reveal his academic foundation, and experimental color separation in the beard and jacket that nod toward Pointillism without fully committing to it. He applied paint more thinly than in his Dutch work but had not yet developed the thick, sculptural impasto of his later years.
This technical plurality reflects an artist in productive confusion, trying on different identities to see which fit. The self-portraits from 1887 show him as a man wearing a grey felt hat, a man in a straw hat, a man before an easel, a man against different colored backgrounds. Each variation tested a different technical problem. How do you make a blue background vibrate against an orange beard? How do you structure a face using separate strokes of color rather than blended tones? How do you balance the need for likeness with the desire for optical experimentation? The paintings ask these questions visibly, on their surfaces, without pretending to have final answers.
This self-portrait from 1887 remains significant not because it represents Van Gogh's mature style but because it captures him in the act of transformation. The grey felt hat, the experimental brushwork, and the brightened palette all document an artist deliberately unmaking his previous identity to construct a new one. For collectors and viewers interested in artistic development rather than finished masterpieces, this moment of technical uncertainty holds particular value. High-quality reproductions of Self-portrait 1 from 1887 allow you to study these visible decisions up close, to see exactly where Van Gogh hesitated between old methods and new possibilities. The grey felt hat sits at that same slight angle in every reproduction, a fixed point in a year of radical artistic instability.