I’ve sometimes wondered what lies behind the self-portrait. Many accomplished artists have produced them and the knee-jerk reaction is to put it down to egotism. You would only really paint a portrait of someone you regard as being significant in some way so ‘Here I am!’ That may be the case with some but for most artists it’s an exercise in self-understanding, a way into the depths that shape the person. If we are honest we are all a bit of a mystery to ourselves, so many contradictions, flashes of heaven, shadows of hell. If you have the gift then self-portrait is a way of seeing yourself, even confronting yourself, getting in touch with those motivations that produce the good or the bad.
I’m sure that was what Vincent Van Gogh was doing in his self-portraits. It is thought that he produced 39 in his lifetime which places him among the most prolific self-portraitists of all time. That may suggest a high degree of self-obsession but it is understandable in a man who had many struggles in his inner life, mental and spiritual, at times was out of control but longed for peace. Was self-portrait a means of getting a grip on his life?
One of my favourites is ‘Self-Portrait As Painter’ which you can see above. This is the way Vincent liked to think of himself, creating, bringing something out of nothing, involved in the one thing that gave him a sense of peace. That becomes all the more significant when you are told that it was painted at a time of physical and mental exhaustion. He explained this in a letter to his sister and how he deliberately shows himself with ‘wrinkles in forehead and around the mouth, stiffly wooden, a very red beard, quite unkempt and sad.’
It’s the eyes that strike me, almost black with just some points of light. Is this something to do with the maxim that the eyes are the window to the soul? Vincent was raised in a Christian home, he studied theology, he was a missionary for a time in a mining district in Southern Belgium. He would know the words of Jesus:
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy,your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy,your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6: 22-23)
What Jesus is talking about here is our spiritual orientation. We sometimes speak of people’s eyes being ‘full’ of the things they want most of all. These words of Jesus are bookended by teaching on the danger of eyes being full of material things and money. If that is the case, if that is the orientation of our inner being, then we are in darkness. I am not sure that this was specifically the darkness Vincent knew within himself but he knew what it was to experience spiritual disorientation, to have his eyes stray from God’s truth and God’s ways. At a time of vulnerability on several different levels the self-portrait has to show his awareness of the darkness within.
I find myself hoping that Vincent had someone who could assure him that this was a common experience of the great men and women in Scripture. People who experienced the reality of God but also struggled with the fragility of their humanity, the tendencies that drew them away from God. Why else would David pray:
‘Teach me your way, O Lord,
and I will walk in your truth;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.’ (Psalm 86: 11)
David is described as ‘a man after (God’s) own heart’ (1 Samuel 13: 14) and yet he was aware of his own vulnerability, that he constantly needed God’s truth to maintain an ‘undivided heart’, a sound spiritual orientation, a life as Jesus was to say ‘full of light.’
