Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat

In the summer of 1887, Van Gogh sat in his tiny Montmartre apartment in Paris, a farmer’s straw hat perched on his head, and painted himself in a mirror. The painting now hangs quietly in the European Paintings galleries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, one of the Met’s most beloved works. But the Van Gogh of 1887 knew none of this — he was 34, had been painting seriously for just seven years, couldn’t sell a single work in Paris, and survived entirely on the monthly allowance his brother Theo sent him. He painted self-portraits not out of vanity, but because he couldn’t afford to hire a model.

Most people seeing this on a phone screen think it’s a “slightly blurry portrait.” But if you actually stand in front of that wall at the Met, you’ll discover something startling: the surface of the canvas is raised. Van Gogh laid paint stroke by stroke, building up layers several millimeters thick in places, like bricklaying a chromatic wall onto the canvas. Clusters of short blue strokes radiate outward, the yellows and oranges on the hat interweave like a wheat field, and the pale blue background is peppered with tiny dashes of green and white — a technique called Post-Impressionist pointillism, which Van Gogh absorbed during his Paris period. When he first arrived in Paris, his palette was still the muddy brown-gray of his Dutch years. But after seeing Seurat’s dots and Monet’s light, he underwent a staggering metamorphosis from earth to sunlight within two years. This self-portrait is the physical proof of that transformation.

Van Gogh’s eye color shifts across his self-portraits — sometimes green, sometimes blue, sometimes somewhere in between. This isn’t because he misremembered the color of his own eyes; it’s because he used color to express emotion. In this painting, he gave himself blue-green eyes, the pupils slightly off-center, lips pressed together but not drooping. The overall expression conveys a peculiar contradiction: there’s the self-deprecation of “I know I look a mess,” but also the stubborn defiance of “but I will not stop.” In an 1887 letter to Theo, Van Gogh wrote a line that could serve as this painting’s caption: “I am a man destined to face a great deal of difficulty, but I am not without hope.”

The straw hat wasn’t a fashion statement — it was a genuine working-class hat. In 19th-century France, straw hats were standard gear for farmers and laborers working under the sun. Van Gogh wore one while painting because he really did haul his easel outdoors and bake for hours at a time. He carried a lifelong, instinctive identification with working people — during his Dutch years he preached to coal miners, gave away his own clothes and food, and ended up living worse off than those he had come to help. In Paris, he’d switched professions to painting, but his core self-identification as “one of them” never changed. This straw hat is his identity statement: I am not a salon gentleman-painter; I am a man who works.

This is the painting’s heaviest shadow. The Van Gogh of 1887 didn’t know he would shoot himself in the abdomen in a wheat field in Auvers-sur-Oise on July 29, 1890, and die in his brother’s arms two days later. He certainly didn’t know that after his death, these paintings would become priceless — in 2022, one of his works sold for $117 million. Standing before this self-portrait at the Met, you’re not looking at a genius showing off technique. You’re looking at a broke, struggling man using his brush to desperately prove his own right to exist. Those blue-green eyes beneath the straw hat aren’t looking at themselves in a mirror — they’re looking at the future. A future he would never live to see.

This self-portrait’s journey was nearly as tumultuous as Van Gogh’s life. After his death, the works passed to his brother Theo. When Theo died six months later, they went to Theo’s wife, Johanna Bonger. Johanna spent thirty years single-handedly championing Van Gogh’s work across Europe — organizing exhibitions, publishing collected letters, contacting dealers and collectors one by one. By the 1920s, Van Gogh had finally transformed from a “mad painter” into a “misunderstood genius.” This Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat passed through private collections before being bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 by philanthropist Adelaide de Groot. From a poor painter’s Montmartre apartment to the most prestigious museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue — that journey took eighty years.

That eighty-year journey ends in the Met’s European Paintings galleries. From a distance it reads as a warm golden glow against blue; up close, each brushstroke is as distinct as a feather — and his eyes hold nothing but raw honesty. His Wheat Field with Cypresses hangs in the adjacent gallery. See the two together and you’ll trace the full arc of one man’s color explosion from Paris to Provence.