Gauguin painted many self-portraits, but few are as enigmatic as this one. It was among the work that Gauguin and his student Meyer Isaac de Haan created to decorate the dining room of the inn where they were staying in Le Pouldu, near Pont-Aven. In the six weeks after their arrival in late 1889, they made dozens of ceramic works, woodcarvings, and sculptures, and covered the walls with paintings. This self-portrait, and one Gauguin did of de Haan, were painted on a pair of cupboard doors.

　At the time, Gauguin's likeness was described by friends as an "unkind character sketch"—a caricature. Today, it is the subject of intense analysis. Some see the artist casting himself in the role of Satan, others as Christ. What are we to make of the imagery—the apples that precipitate man's fall from grace; the halo over Gauguin's disembodied head; the snake that is both tempter of Eve and the embodiment of knowledge; the bold division into vivid yellow and red, evocative of both hellfire and the heat of creation? Perhaps it is most likely that Gauguin is revealing his conception of the artist as hero, and—almost to challenge his colleagues—of himself, particularly, as a kind of magus, a master who knows that he possesses the power of magic by virtue of talent and genius.

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　Self–portraiture constituted a significant element of Gauguin's production, particularly in 1888 and 1889. Gauguin's interest was prompted in part by Vincent van Gogh's 1888 portrait series including La Mousmé, which Gauguin knew from his correspondence with Van Gogh and his brother Theo. In addition, Van Gogh hoped to establish an artists' colony in the south that could be analogous to Gauguin's circle in Brittany and proposed an exchange of self–portraits. Gauguin's only known statements about his self–portraiture concern a work similar to the National Gallery’s Self–Portrait and thus have relevance. Gauguin refers to "the face of an outlaw . . . with an inner nobility and gentleness," a face that is "symbol of the contemporary impressionist painter" and "a portrait of all wretched victims of society."

　This Self–Portrait, painted on a cupboard door from the dining room of an inn in the Breton hamlet Le Pouldu, is one of Gauguin's most important and radical paintings. His haloed head and disembodied right hand, a snake inserted between the fingers, float on amorphous zones of yellow and red. Elements of caricature add an ironic and aggressively ambivalent inflection to this painted assertion of Gauguin's artistic superiority and make him the sardonic hero of his new aesthetic system.

 

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