Self-Portrait Les Misérables

Self-Portrait Les Misérables: Introduction

Paul Gauguin's Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables) is a portrait exchange turned into a manifesto. The governing Van Gogh Museum catalogue title matters because the common shorthand, Self-Portrait Les Misérables, can make the painting sound like a simple literary nickname. It is more precise than that. The work is a self-portrait, a portrait-within-a-portrait, a dedication to Vincent van Gogh and a staged claim about the modern artist as misunderstood outsider. ^[1]

At a Glance

• ArtistPaul Gauguin ^[1]
• TitleSelf-Portrait Les Misérables ^[1]
• Date1888 ^[1]
• Mediumoil on canvas ^[1]
• Dimensions / object size44.5 by 50.3 centimetres ^[1]
• Object recordSmarthistory gives the basic object details as oil on canvas, 44.5 by 50.3 centimetres, now in the Van Gogh Museum. ^[1]
• FocusPaul Gauguin's Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables) is a portrait exchange turned into a manifesto.

Contents

1. Self-Portrait Les Misérables: Introduction
2. Pont-Aven and the Arles Request
3. A Paired Exchange
4. Composition and Wallpaper
5. Les Misérables: Inscription and Literary Role
6. Abstraction, Colour and Technique
7. Van Gogh's Response
8. Portraiture, Persona and Ethical Limits

Pont-Aven and the Arles Request

The painting was made in 1888, when Gauguin and Emile Bernard were in Pont-Aven and Van Gogh was in Arles. Smarthistory gives the basic object details as oil on canvas, 44.5 by 50.3 centimetres, now in the Van Gogh Museum. ^[2] The museum catalogue identifies the collection context as the works collected by Theo and Vincent van Gogh, and the image caption records the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. ^[1] Those facts already place the painting inside a triangle of artists rather than inside Gauguin's career alone.

The immediate trigger was Van Gogh's request for portraits. Around 11 September 1888, he wrote from Arles that he wanted Gauguin's portrait of Bernard and Bernard's portrait of Gauguin. ^{[1] [3]} The request was friendly, but it was also strategic. Van Gogh had been trying to persuade Gauguin to join him in Arles, and the museum catalogue reads the exchange as a way to build solidarity between Arles and Pont-Aven. ^[1] A portrait would therefore do more than record a face. It would create a visible bond among artists who wanted to imagine themselves as a working community outside the official Salon system.

A Paired Exchange

Gauguin and Bernard answered the request by changing it. In a letter of 1 October 1888, Gauguin told Van Gogh that they had satisfied his wish, but in another way. ^[4] The solution was a pair of self-images: Gauguin showed himself with Bernard present inside the composition, while Bernard produced the companion arrangement with Gauguin behind him. ^{[1] [4]} That alteration is central to the painting's meaning. Gauguin did not simply send Van Gogh a likeness of Bernard. He sent himself, with Bernard inserted into the picture, so that the work became an image of friendship, rivalry and artistic self-definition all at once.

Composition and Wallpaper

The composition makes that social structure visible. Gauguin pushes his own head towards one side of the canvas, places Bernard at the opposite edge and fills the centre with patterned wallpaper. ^[1] The background is not empty space. It is a decorative field that keeps the two artists apart while holding them in the same image. Gauguin's face is close, severe and heavily contoured; Bernard's appears as a secondary presence. The painting therefore turns an exchange portrait into a statement about hierarchy as well as fellowship. Gauguin is answering Van Gogh, but he is also deciding how the group should see him.

Les Misérables: Inscription and Literary Role

The lower-right inscription sharpens the performance. The Van Gogh Museum records that Gauguin added the words les misérables along with his signature, the date and a dedication to Van Gogh. ^[1] The visible inscription is commonly recorded as les misérables / à l'ami Vincent / P. Gauguin 88. ^[8] That combination makes the painting both gift and argument. It names the literary role Gauguin wanted the viewer to bring to the image, marks the work as a personal offering to Van Gogh, and fixes the self-portrait within the 1888 exchange.

Gauguin explained the literary role himself. The Van Gogh Museum catalogue links the inscription to his letters to Van Gogh and Emile Schuffenecker, where he connected the portrait to Jean Valjean, Victor Hugo's persecuted protagonist in Les Misérables. ^[1] In the 1 October letter to Van Gogh, Gauguin described the figure as a powerful, badly dressed outlaw with inward nobility. ^[4] That should be read as self-fashioning, not as factual autobiography. Gauguin was not confessing to criminality, nor proving moral purity. He was borrowing Valjean as a public image for the avant-garde artist: rejected, misunderstood, apparently rough, but convinced of inner value.

The same letters make the claim collective. Gauguin presented the portrait as his individual image and also as a likeness of a wider group of artists treated as victims by society. ^{[1] [4]} That move is ambitious. It places Van Gogh, Bernard and Gauguin inside one dramatic identity, while also letting Gauguin occupy the leading role. The painting speaks to Van Gogh's loneliness and his dream of artistic brotherhood, but it answers that dream in Gauguin's language: literary, symbolic, controlled and self-promotional.

Abstraction, Colour and Technique

Style is part of that language. Gauguin did not want the self-portrait to look naturalistic. The Van Gogh Museum catalogue records his insistence on abstraction, symbolic drawing and colour far from ordinary likeness. ^[1] In the same 1 October letter, he compared the drawing of the eyes and nose to the flowers in Persian carpets. ^[4] The point is not that the face literally copies a carpet. The point is that Gauguin was defending an art of deliberate distortion and decorative structure. The face was meant to carry an idea, not merely to imitate skin, light and shadow.

The technical evidence supports that reading. The Van Gogh Museum catalogue describes a thin, absorbent ground and a matte, dry-looking surface, with paint soaking into the canvas and Prussian-blue contours used to define the forms. ^[1] That matters because the painting's severity is not only iconography. It is made through surface. Gauguin avoids the polished finish and seamless modelling associated with academic illusion. He gives Van Gogh a portrait whose material bluntness matches its outsider role.

Van Gogh's Response

Van Gogh first received Gauguin's explanation, then the painting itself. ^[1] This sequence matters. Before seeing the canvas, Van Gogh was moved by the idea and even feared that his own return gift might not be enough. ^[1] After the painting arrived, his response became more divided. In the letter of 4 or 5 October 1888, he compared the works and described Gauguin's portrait as more studied; he also thought Gauguin appeared ill and tormented. ^{[1] [5]} That reaction was not simply a rejection. Van Gogh recognised the ambition of the picture, but he was uneasy about its pessimism and its lack of spontaneity.

The disagreement reveals two different ideas of self-portraiture. Van Gogh wanted the portrait exchange to build artistic fraternity and to make the artists present to one another. Gauguin used it to stage a dense symbolic identity. Van Gogh could admire the seriousness and still think the work had gone too far into darkness. ^{[1] [5]} The painting therefore records a tension before the famous Arles collaboration even began: Van Gogh hoped for shared life and mutual encouragement, while Gauguin was already constructing the artist as a powerful, isolated figure.

That does not mean the painting should be read through the later crisis in Arles. The ear incident and breakdown of the collaboration postdate this 1888 portrait. Here, Arles is useful only as pressure in the background. The October letters show Van Gogh wanting Gauguin to come south and become, in his view, more restored and expansive. ^{[1] [6]} They do not turn the Pont-Aven self-portrait into a prediction. The safer reading is narrower and stronger: in this painting, Gauguin presented himself to Van Gogh as a difficult, self-conscious, symbol-making artist whose persona was already inseparable from style.

Portraiture, Persona and Ethical Limits

The National Gallery's Gauguin Portraits exhibition helps explain why this is still a portrait rather than just a literary puzzle. The exhibition describes Gauguin using selected attributes and suggestive contexts so portraits could express meanings beyond personality. ^[7] Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables) does exactly that. Its attributes are not props alone: the inscription, the inset portrait, the wallpaper, the heavy contours and the dry surface all work together. They make likeness answerable to social exchange, literary role and artistic theory.

The ethical caution is the same one that applies across Gauguin's self-portraits. The painting is brilliant self-invention, but self-invention is not innocence. Gauguin turns marginality into a heroic role, and that role can make real artistic ambition look like moral victimhood. Later, similar strategies would feed more troubling myths around escape, primitivism and colonial elsewhere. In 1888 the immediate language is Valjean, Pont-Aven and Van Gogh, not Tahiti. Even so, the habit is visible: Gauguin uses art to persuade viewers that his chosen separateness is meaningful.

Seen whole, Self-Portrait Les Misérables is strongest when its contradictions remain intact. It is a gift and a performance, a friendship object and a power move, a self-portrait and a portrait of an artistic group, a decorative experiment and a claim to moral seriousness. The words les misérables do not solve the painting. They tell us how deliberately Gauguin wanted it read. He made his face into Jean Valjean, but he also made Jean Valjean into a theory of modern art.

Related Pages

• Paul Gauguin Self-Portraits
• Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake
• Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ
• Paul Gauguin in Arles with Vincent van Gogh

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. Joost van der Hoeven, "Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les misérables), 1888," in Contemporaries of Van Gogh 1: Works Collected by Theo and Vincent, Van Gogh Museum View source
2. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables)," Smarthistory View source
3. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, c. 11 September 1888, letter 680, Van Gogh Letters View source
4. Paul Gauguin, letter to Vincent van Gogh, 1 October 1888, letter 692, Van Gogh Letters View source
5. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, 4 or 5 October 1888, letter 697, Van Gogh Letters View source
6. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, 8 October 1888, letter 699, Van Gogh Letters View source
7. National Gallery, London, "The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Gauguin Portraits." View source
8. Wikimedia Commons, "File:WLANL - artanonymous - Zelfportret met portret van Bernard.jpg." View source