Held at the Courtauld Gallery, that painting doesn’t appear on the Van Gogh Museum’s site, but those that do reveal aspects of the painter (literally, in some cases) artistically unexplored by his more widely seen works. The most famous of those, 1889’s Self-Portrait With a Bandaged Ear (one of two painted that year), hints at the act of self-mutilation that followed one of his many quarrels with his friend and colleague Paul Gauguin. We’ve all seen Van Gogh’s two or three most well-known self-portraits.

That mirror, Van Gogh wrote in another letter, was “good enough to enable me to work from my image in default of a model, because if I can manage to paint the coloring of my own head, which is not to be done without some difficulty, I shall likewise be able to paint the heads of other good souls, men and women.” At the Van Gogh Museum’s online collection you can browse up close and in detail - as well as download - seventeen examples of the painter’s essays in his own head color, and much else about himself besides. Always short of funds, but especially straitened there, he saved the cost of hiring models by investing in a mirror instead.

Between the years 18, Van Gogh painted himself more than 35 times, most of them during the two years in the middle when he lived in Paris. “They say - and I gladly believe it - that it is difficult to know yourself,” Vincent Van Gogh once wrote to his brother Theo, “but it isn’t easy to paint oneself either.” This from one of the most prolific self-portraitists of all time.

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