Self-Portrait

In the pictureA man with a red beard turns his body and face halfway toward the left of the picture, with only his eyes directed toward us. His forehead is bright with pale yellow and pink, his eyes are blue-green, and his beard and mustache are thick strokes of orange and red. His reddish-brown coat is densely mixed with short strokes of red, green and blue, and inside the lapels a white shirt collar and a small blue tie are visible. On the dark blue-green background, orange and red dots are scattered, spreading out as if to encircle his head.

BackgroundArriving in Paris in early 1886, Van Gogh lived with his brother Theo in Montmartre and encountered the work of the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters. Among these was the pointillism Seurat displayed in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, a painting that is also now at the Art Institute of Chicago. Van Gogh did not follow the method exactly, but stretched the dots into short strokes to give them direction. Painted in 1887, this picture is on board rather than canvas. In his Paris years, when he had no money for models, he painted more than twenty self-portraits while looking in a mirror.

Puzzle tipFit the face first. The orange beard and the bright forehead stand out most, and the ear on the right and the white shirt collar help fix their positions. The coat has a blue lapel line running across its reddish-brown ground, so join pieces along that line. The background, a blue-green dot pattern taking up nearly half the picture, is the hardest part. The dots flow in a circle around the head, so look at the direction the dots lean to decide whether a piece belongs left or right of the head. The coat's strokes are elongated while the background's dots are smaller and rounder, so where the two get mixed up, separate them by the shape of the marks. 100 pieces is about right.