Van Gogh, Self-Portraits, The Courtauld review ★★★★★

If you close your eyes and think of Van Gogh, it is likely that one of his self-portraits will first come to mind, perhaps it will be the one with the Bandaged Ear or the one with a straw hat.

The artist’s self-portraits have come to define him in the public imagination. It was originally his lack of funds that was one of the reasons he painted so many self-portraits - thirty-five painted representations and two drawings survived. But Van Gogh was also looking for something in his reflection, some truth about himself, ‘to show people that there’s something else in human beings besides what the photographer is able to get out of them.’

This exhibition features sixteen self-portraits rarely lent and coming from collections from all over the world. It marks the first ever opportunity to see so many of them in the same space.

'It’s been quite a challenge to organise,’ Courtauld director Ernst Vegelin van Clearbergen sighs. But what an achievement!

The paintings follow the work and evolution of Van Gogh’s self-representation from his formative time in Paris to the radical transformation of his style during his years in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. But what it really offers is an electrifying insight into the artist’s personality, his artistic quest, his struggle and his resilience.

‘Who am I?’ asks the artist in each of his self-portraits.

While his gaunt face, his ginger hair and his green eyes are highly recognisable, what immediately strikes the visitor is the artist's ever-changing approach to his work, as if constantly testing his abilities. If his earliest Parisian self-portraits show a strong impressionist influence - from Toulouse-Lautrec to Claude Monet and most notably George Seurat and his pointillist method - his arrival in Provence marks a radical change; strokes are more assured and his palette bolder.

It is impossible not to be sucked into Van Gogh’s gaze and at times it is almost unbearable to look him in the eye. For there is no compromise in the artist’s endeavour of trying to untangle the mystery of his own self.

The Courtauld’s well-known Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is used as as springboard into the exhibition, but it is the two Self-Portraits in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, painted one week apart, months before the artist’s death, that steal the show.

The contrast between the two paintings is an ultimate acknowledgement of the mystery of the mind. In the first self-portrait, painted when Van Gogh was at Saint Rémy’s psychiatric hospital, distress is overwhelming. The following self-portrait, painted only a week later, exults instead boldness and confidence.

An unmissable show.