Stalking Van Gogh
- Elle Bee
- Dec 12, 2025
- 13 min read
Updated: Dec 16, 2025
Bold, uplifting, sincere, passionate, authentic, unfiltered, vibrant. Experiencing a Van Gogh art work is not merely seeing it; it is a profoundly moving encounter.
Below are selected works and where you can find them in various museums:
Self Portraits
There are over 35 self-portraits. He created the majority of them in the last four years of his life (1886 to 1889) using them as practice portraiture and to explore different artistic styles.
Found at The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London, United Kingdom.
This famous painting, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Vincent van Gogh, expresses his artistic power and personal struggles. Van Gogh painted it in January 1889, a week after leaving hospital. He had received treatment there after cutting off most of his left ear (shown here as the bandaged right ear because he painted himself in a mirror). This self-mutilation was a desperate act committed a few weeks earlier, following a heated argument with his fellow painter Paul Gauguin who had come to stay with him in Arles, in the south of France. Van Gogh returned from hospital to find Gauguin gone and with him, the dream of setting up a ‘studio of the south’, where like-minded artists could share ideas and work side by side.
The fur cap Van Gogh wears in this painting is a reminder of the harsh working conditions he faced in January 1889: the hat was a recent purchase to secure his thick bandage in place and to ward off the winter cold. This self-portrait is thus powerful proof of Van Gogh’s determination to continue painting. It is reinforced by the objects behind him, which take on a symbolic meaning: a canvas on an easel, just begun, and a Japanese print, an important source of inspiration. Above all, it is Van Gogh’s powerful handling of colour and brushwork that declare his ambition as a painter (text by the Courtauld).
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in the winter of 1887–88, when he had been in Paris for almost two years. It is clear from the work that he had studied the technique of the Pointillists and applied it in his own, original way. He placed the short stripes of paint in different directions. Where they follow the outline of his head, they form a kind of halo.
The painting is also one of Van Gogh’s boldest colour experiments in Paris. He placed complementary colours alongside one another using long brushstrokes: blue and orange in the background, and red and green in the beard and eyes. The colours intensify one another. The red pigment has faded, so the purple strokes are now blue, which means the contrast with the yellow is less powerful (text by Van Gogh Museum).
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
This sketchy self-portrait is an example of the amazingly rapid progress Van Gogh made in Paris. The summery palette and loose brushwork betray the influence of the Impressionists. The smock, hat and background consist of large, outlined areas of colour. The face and beard are built up in more detail using different tones.
Van Gogh was practising painting portraits. Because models were expensive, he bought a good mirror and used himself as his subject. He later wrote to his brother Theo: 'because if I can manage to paint the coloration of my own head, which is not without presenting some difficulty, I'll surely be able to paint the heads of the other fellows and women as well.'
Found at Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
Like Rembrandt and Goya, Vincent van Gogh often used himself as a model; he produced over forty-three self-portraits, paintings or drawings in ten years. Like the old masters, he observed himself critically in a mirror. Painting oneself is not an innocuous act: it is a questioning which often leads to an identity crisis.
Thus he wrote to his sister: "I am looking for a deeper likeness than that obtained by a photographer." And later to his brother: "People say, and I am willing to believe it, that it is hard to know yourself. But it is not easy to paint yourself, either. The portraits painted by Rembrandt are more than a view of nature, they are more like a revelation".
In this head-and-shoulders view, the artist is wearing a suit and not the pea jacket he usually worked in. Attention is focused on the face. His features are hard and emaciated, his green-rimmed eyes seem intransigent and anxious. The dominant colour, a mix of absinth green and pale turquoise finds a counterpoint in its complementary colour, the fiery orange of the beard and hair. The model's immobility contrasts with the undulating hair and beard, echoed and amplified in the hallucinatory arabesques of the background (text by Musée d'Orsay).
Found at Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.
Not much text accompanies this painting at the Kunstmuseum except for " Deposit of the Dr. h.c. Emile Dreyfus-Stiftung, 1970”.
Vincent van Gogh collected hundreds of Japanese prints. He started his collection when he lived in Paris with his brother Theo. He studied the prints and was convinced that the art of the future had to be colourful and joyous, just like Japanese printmaking. Some of which are represented below.
Japanese Influence
"If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass."
Vincent Van Gogh, 1888 in a letter to his brother Theo.
In Van Gogh’s letters, it is clear that Japan held magical, mystical significance for him. In his imagination, the Land of the Rising Sun was a fountainhead of grace and well-being, a blessed utopia.
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Van Gogh copied this depiction of a plum orchard in bloom at sunset from a woodcut in his collection. He did, however, take some liberties in his use of colour. He replaced the black and grey of the monumental tree trunk in the foreground with red and blue tints.
Van Gogh also introduced the ornamental orange borders with Japanese characters solely to create a decorative and ‘exotic’ effect (text by Van Gogh Museum).
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Van Gogh reproduced a print by Keisai Eisen that appeared in Paris illustré in 1886. Van Gogh used bright, contrasting colours and added a border with aquatic creatures and plants (text by Van Gogh Museum).
The Flowers
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Van Gogh painted this still life in the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy. For him, the painting was mainly a study in colour. He set out to achieve a powerful colour contrast. By placing the purple flowers against a yellow background, he made the decorative forms stand out even more strongly. The irises were originally purple. But as the red pigment has faded, they have turned blue. Van Gogh made two paintings of this bouquet. In the other still life, he contrasted purple and pink with green (text by Van Gogh Museum).
Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Large blossom branches like this against a blue sky were one of Van Gogh’s favourite subjects. Almond trees flower early in the spring making them a symbol of new life. Van Gogh borrowed the subject, the bold outlines and the positioning of the tree in the picture plane from Japanese printmaking.
The painting was a gift for his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo, who had just had a baby son, Vincent Willem. In the letter announcing the new arrival, Theo wrote: ‘As we told you, we’ll name him after you, and I’m making the wish that he may be as determined and as courageous as you.’ Unsurprisingly, it was this work that remained closest to the hearts of the Van Gogh family. Vincent Willem went on to found the Van Gogh Museum.
Found at Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France.
Sometimes titled Japanese Vase with Roses and Anemones.
The combination of Japanese aesthetics and the artist’s unique approach illustrates van Gogh’s exploration and synthesis of different influences, making it a noteworthy representation of Post-Impressionist sensibilities.
His world
Van Gogh revolutionised his style in a symphony of poetic colour and texture. He was inspired by poets, writers and artists. His desire to tell stories produced a drawings of poetic imagination and romantic love on an ambitious scale.
Left to Right (list below, sequence viewed on desktop)
Row 1:
A Wheatfield with Cypresses, 1889. (Found at National Gallery London.
Van Gogh painted several versions of during the summer of 1889, while he was a patient in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Paul de Mausole, in the village of St-Rémy in the south of France. A first version, which he described as a study, was painted on site in late June 1889. The National Gallery’s painting, which was completed in September while Van Gogh was confined to his hospital room, is the finished version. He also made a smaller copy of it for his mother and sister.
The landscape includes typically Provençal motifs such as a golden wheat field, tall evergreen cypresses, an olive bush and a backdrop of the blue Alpilles mountains. Van Gogh wrote of painting outdoors during the summer mistral, the strong, cold wind of southern France, which here seems to animate the entire landscape. Everything is depicted with powerful rhythmic lines and swirling brushstrokes that convey Van Gogh’s sense of nature’s vitality (text by National Gallery London).
De tuin van de inrichting in Saint-Rémy, May 1889. Translated - The Garden of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands).
For The garden of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh chooses an unusual viewpoint, next to the wall of the hospital. Due to the diagonal path with a stone bench, the painting acquires a particularly spatial effect. The exuberantly flowering bushes and trees are depicted in a tangle of thickly painted brushstrokes. Despite the huge variety of shapes and colours, the composition has both depth and structure.
The meaning of colours
In September of the previous year, Van Gogh writes from Arles to his sister Wil about what the colours mean to him: ‘We need good cheer and happiness, hope and love. The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant colour, well arranged, resplendent’ (text by Kröller-Müller Museum).
Row 2:
The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles, 1889. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from The Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture, Oskar Reinhart Collection.) The artwork depicts part of the arcaded cloister-like courtyard with its colourful enclosed garden. The male patients were housed on the upper level, on the right in the painting.
‘Am Römerholz’, Winterthur. Translated - Landscape at Twilight, 1890. (Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.)
Row 3:
The Harvest, 1888. (Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
You can almost feel the dryness and heat in this painting of the flat landscape around Arles in the south of France. Van Gogh combined the azure blue of the sky with yellow and green tones for the land to capture the atmosphere of a summer’s day. He worked in the wheatfields for days at a time under the burning sun. This was an immensely productive period, in which he completed ten paintings and five drawings in just over a week, until a heavy storm brought the harvest season to an end.
Van Gogh wanted to show peasant life and work on the land – a recurring theme in his art – and painted several stages of the harvest. We see a half mowed wheatfield, ladders and several carts. A reaper works in the background, which is why he titled the work La moisson or 'The Harvest'. Van Gogh considered it one of his most successful paintings, writing to his brother Theo that the ‘canvas absolutely kills all the rest’ (text by Van Gogh Museum).
L’église d’Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet, 1890. Translated -The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise, View from the Chevet. (Found at Musée d'Orsay, Paris).
After his stay in the south of France, first in Arles and then at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Vincent van Gogh settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village near Paris. His brother Theo, worried about his health, encouraged him to see Dr. Gachet, himself a painter, who agreed to treat him. During the two months between his arrival in Auvers on May 21, 1890, and his death on July 29, the artist produced approximately seventy canvases, more than one a day, and numerous drawings. This painting is the only one Vincent van Gogh dedicated to the church in Auvers. This church, built in the 13th century in the early Gothic style, flanked by two Romanesque chapels, becomes, under the artist's brush, a flamboyant monument that seems ready to collapse under the pressure of the ground and the two paths that enclose it. Comparing this painting with Claude Monet's Cathedrals, painted shortly afterward, reveals the differences between van Gogh's approach and that of the Impressionists. Unlike Monet, he does not seek to capture the interplay of light on the monument. Even though the church remains recognizable, the canvas offers the viewer less a faithful image of reality than a form of its "expression." The artistic techniques employed by van Gogh foreshadow the work of the Fauves and the Expressionist painters (text by Musée d'Orsay).
Hospital at Saint-Rémy, 1889. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from The Armand Hammer Collection, Gift of the Armand Hammer Foundation, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.)
Van Gogh chose a vertical format to give full height to the massive pine trees that dwarfed the male wing of the hospital building. The reddish soil, highly stylised tree trunks and interlocking branches overhead produce a vibrant but oppressive environment within which Van Gogh arranges a number of figures, including perhaps himself, just left of centre. The women are an invention; female patients were not allowed in this part of the grounds (text by National Gallery, London.)
Row 4:
Tree Trunks in the Grass,1890. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from Kröller-Mülier Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands.)
Garden with Courting Couples: Square Saint-Pierre, 1887. (Found at Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands).
Van Gogh called this sunny park scene 'the painting of the garden with lovers'. Couples in love are strolling under the young chestnut trees and sitting along the winding paths.
He used a free variation on the technique of the Pointillists. They built up their compositions from dots of paint. Van Gogh instead applied small brushstrokes of varying length in different directions. This helped him to create the effect of a radiant spring day, which fit the sense of intimacy and togetherness he wished to express. He too longed for a wife and a family, but he had 'the most impossible love affairs'. He eventually resigned himself to the situation; he was devoted to his art (text by Van Gogh Museum).
Row 5:
La Méridienne, entre 1889 et 1890. Translated - The Siesta (Found at Musée d'Orsay, Paris). The Siesta was painted while Van Gogh was interned in a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy de Provence. The composition is taken from a drawing by Millet for Four Moments in the Day. To justify his act, Vincent told his brother Theo: “I am using another language, that of colours, to translate the impressions of light and dark into black and white”. Van Gogh often copied the works of Millet, whom he considered to be “a more modern painter than Manet”. Remaining faithful to the original composition, even down to the still life details in the foreground, Van Gogh nevertheless imposes his own style upon this restful scene which, for Millet, symbolized rural France of the 1860’s. This highly personal retranscription is achieved primarily by means of a chromatic construction based on contrasting complementary colours: blue-violet, yellow-orange. Despite the peaceful nature of the subject, the picture radiates Van Gogh’s unique artistic intensity (text by Musée d'Orsay).
The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy),1889. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, 1947.)
Vincent van Gogh painted this autumnal landscape while living at an asylum near Saint-Rémy in southern France where he was treated for severe depression (text by National Gallery London).
Row 6
Chaumes de Cordeville à Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890. Translated -Thatched Cottages at Cordeville in Auvers-sur-Oise. (Found at Musée d'Orsay, Paris). This was painted during the most frenetic creative period of the artist’s career, a few weeks before his tragic end. Van Gogh left Provence in May 1890, at the end of his voluntary stay at the Saint-Rémy asylum. He settled in Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. On June 10, he wrote to his brother Théo that he was “making two studies of houses in the countryside”. Corot, Daubigny, Pissarro and Cézanne had already evoked the peaceful charm of Auvers. Van Gogh, for his part, would transform it into a volcanic land where the houses seemed twisted by an earthquake (text by Musée d'Orsay).
Mountains at Saint-Rémy, 1889. (Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition. Loan from Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978.)
During the years preceding his suicide in 1890, Vincent van Gogh suffered increasingly frequent attacks of mental distress, the cause of which remains unclear. Mountains at Saint-Rémy was painted in July 1889, when Van Gogh was recovering from just such an episode at the hospital of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in the southern French town of Saint-Rémy. The painting represents the Alpilles, a low range of mountains visible from the hospital grounds. In it, Van Gogh activated the terrain and sky with the heavy impasto and bold, broad brushstrokes characteristic of his late work (text by National Gallery London).
Exhibited at National Gallery London in Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibition.
Loan from Musée d’Orsay, Paris, Donation of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kahn-Sriber, in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Fernand Moch, 1975.
From the moment of his arrival in Arles, on 8 February 1888, Van Gogh was constantly preoccupied with the representation of “night effects”. In April 1888, he wrote to his brother Theo: “I need a starry night with cypresses or maybe above a field of ripe wheat.” In June, he confided to the painter Emile Bernard: “But when shall I ever paint the Starry Sky, this painting that keeps haunting me” and, in September, in a letter to his sister, he evoked the same subject: “Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day”,
During the same month of September, he finally realised his obsessive project.
He first painted a corner of nocturnal sky in Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles (Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Muller).
Next came this view of the Rhône in which he marvellously transcribed the colours he perceived in the dark. Blues prevail: Prussian blue, ultramarine and cobalt. The city gas lights glimmer an intense orange and are reflected in the water. The stars sparkle like gemstones (text by National Gallery London).
His Sunflowers, Chairs and Bedroom paintings will be featured in a separate blog: “Same but Different”.
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