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Van Gogh self-portrait with a beard, a buttoned jacket and a background full of wavy swirls. An art printable for kids, teens and families; free PDF.
Printable sheet
Free for personal and educational use
Download PDFPrintVan Gogh from the chest up, with a beard, swept-back hair, a buttoned jacket and a background full of swirls and waves.
Use blues and turquoises in the background and oranges in the beard for contrast.
Make your own self-portrait using a mirror and add a background that shows your mood.
Van Gogh made more than eight hundred paintings in roughly a decade.
The Van Gogh self-portrait is almost a category of its own. Vincent van Gogh painted himself more than thirty times in a career that lasted only about ten years. Most of those portraits came from his time in Paris, between 1886 and 1888, when he discovered the bright colors of the impressionists.
His reason was mostly practical. Van Gogh had very little money and could not afford to pay models, so he sat in front of a mirror and used himself as the subject. In letters to his brother Theo, he explained that he wanted to get better at painting faces and studying skin tones.
Each one is different. In some he wears a straw hat, in others he smokes a pipe, and in a few he appears with a bandaged ear after his crisis in Arles. One of the most famous, painted in Saint-Rémy in 1889, has a background of swirling blue that seems to move around him, much like the sky in The Starry Night.
These paintings show us what Van Gogh looked like, and also how he felt. His intense gaze and restless brushstrokes reveal an artist who looked at himself with total honesty. Today his self-portraits hang in museums around the world, including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
