Are There Real Photos of Van Gogh? The One Picture We Have

It is the portrait at the top of this page, taken by a photographer in The Hague named Jacobus de Louw. The Art Newspaper credits the picture to him and gives its Van Gogh Museum number, b4784. ^[6] It was taken a few months before Vincent left for his first job abroad, as an art dealer in London. ^[2]

Look closely and you see what the museum calls a slightly gruff expression. ^[3] The picture was published in 1914 as the only known photographic portrait of Vincent, and it has that status once again. ^[1] After the age of 19, he never had another portrait photograph taken. ^[2]

You have probably seen it: a curly-haired boy with pale eyes and a striped tie. It was first shown as Vincent at a 1957 exhibition organized by the Belgian researcher Mark Edo Tralbaut, and it went on to appear in countless biographies. ^[7] For about 60 years it was a case of mistaken identity. ^[1]

Doubts began in 2014, when a Dutch television program compared it with the 1873 portrait. ^[7] Then Yves Vasseur noticed that the photographer, Balduin Schwarz, only set up his studio in Brussels in 1870, when Vincent was already 17. ^[1][7] Theo, on the other hand, moved to Brussels early in 1873 to work for Goupil & Cie, and his letters show he had his photo taken there in February of that year, at 15. ^[1][7]

A forensic comparison by Zeno Geradts, a University of Amsterdam professor, found a “high likelihood” that the boy is Theo, and the museum accepted the result in 2018. ^[2]

The museum lists two, and neither is a clear portrait. In 1971 a group photograph of pupils at the HBS, a secondary school in Tilburg, taken in 1866 or 1867, was found; it possibly includes Vincent. ^[1]

The other dates from 1886–1887, during his Paris years. It shows him from behind, sitting opposite Émile Bernard on the banks of the Seine near Asnières. ^[1] The Art Newspaper sums it up: the 1873 picture is the only proper photograph of him as an adult, and one other shows him at a distance from behind. ^[6]

In 2015 a tintype from 1887 went to auction at Romantic Agony in Brussels. Some scholars said Van Gogh sits third from the left, with Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin at the same table, in a picture believed to be by the amateur photographer Jules Antoine. ^[8]

Be careful with it. Van Gogh never mentions the gathering in his letters, and the photo expert at the Van Gogh Museum simply did not see a likeness. ^[8] The picture failed to reach its asking price of $136,000. ^[8] For the museum, the count stays at one portrait photo. ^[3]

The Van Gogh Museum puts it plainly: he was not fond of portrait photography, certainly not in his later life. ^[7] He said so himself. Writing to his sister Willemien from Saint-Rémy on 19 September 1889, he added that such portraits “are faded more quickly than we ourselves, while the painted portrait remains for many generations.” ^[4]

In June 1890, writing from Auvers about his portrait of Dr Gachet, he went further: “I would like to do portraits which would look like apparitions to people a century later. So I don’t try to do us by photographic resemblance but by our passionate expressions.” ^[5] More of his correspondence is gathered in our guide to Van Gogh's letters.

Money mattered too. He painted over 35 self-portraits, more than 25 of them in Paris between 1886 and 1888, when he was short of money and struggled to find models. ^[3] He sometimes painted them on the back of other paintings to save money. ^[3] After he cut off his ear in December 1888, he even reported on it in two self-portraits. ^[3] Our guide to Van Gogh's self-portraits goes through the whole series, period by period.

His self-portraits tell us he had red hair, green eyes and an angular face, yet each of those faces is different. ^[3] Compare two Paris pictures with the 1873 photo at the top. In Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, from the autumn of 1887, the short strokes of paint follow the outline of his head and form a kind of halo. ^[12] In Self-Portrait as a Painter, from the winter of 1887–88, he holds a palette and brushes behind his easel, in the bright, almost unblended colors of a modern artist. ^[11]

The second one is the last he made in Paris. ^[3] You can look at either in detail on its page: Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat and Self-Portrait as a Painter. To browse more faces, try our portrait paintings.

For a likeness by another hand, the museum points to the modest 1886 portrait by John Peter Russell as the most accurate. ^[1] Russell, an Australian painter, met Vincent in Cormon's studio in Paris and painted him in a conventional, realistic style that is clearly influenced by photography. ^[9] The painter Archibald Standish Hartrick, who met Vincent at Russell’s studio, thought it the most accurate portrait of Van Gogh, more realistic than any of his self-portraits. ^[9] Vincent himself asked Theo to take good care of it, because it meant a lot to him. ^[9]

Paul Gauguin's version is an interpretation, not a record. In Arles in 1888 he painted Vincent at work in front of a vase of sunflowers, although it was December and the flowers were long out of season. ^[10] Nine months later, Vincent wrote to Theo about this portrait: “My face has lit up after all a lot since, but it was indeed me, extremely tired and charged with electricity as I was then.” ^[10] Read the whole story in our guide to Gauguin's portrait of Van Gogh.