What did Vincent van Gogh look like? Only one photograph of the artist exists, and in it he’s unrecognisable. At 19, the beard has not yet appeared; the familiar inverted triangle of his skull still goes incognito beneath the fleshiness of youth. Later, several of his friends would make portraits of him. But if we know him by his bristles in their pictures, he’s still several kinds of man.
Toulouse-Lautrec casts him in pastel with the far-off look of the absinthe drinker. In Pissarro’s sketch, in which he sits beside his top-hatted brother, Theo, he is almost (but not quite) the dandy. Gauguin famously has him at his easel, the sunflowers beside him doing nothing whatsoever to ease his mood, which is downcast, shuttered against the world. “It’s me all right, but me gone mad,” he is supposed to have said, on first seeing it.
