Self-portrait (Near Golgotha)

Self-Portrait (Near Golgotha, 1896) at the São Paulo Museum of Art is among Gauguin's most haunting and psychologically intense late self-portraits, painted during his second Tahitian stay at a period of severe physical and psychological crisis. His health was deteriorating from syphilis and its treatments, his finances were catastrophic, and his letters from this period convey a sense of progressive abandonment by everyone he had relied on in Europe. The Golgotha reference — the hill where Christ was crucified — combined with the previous self-portrait as Christ in the Garden of Olives (1889) to create a persistent identification between the suffering, martyred artist and the suffering Christ. The São Paulo Museum of Art holds this self-portrait as one of the most significant European works in its collection — the museum's strong Post-Impressionist holdings include the Gauguin alongside major Cézannes, Renoirs, and Van Goghs that were acquired through the cultural ambition of São Paulo's modernizing business class in the mid-twentieth century.

Gauguin applied paint in broad, flat planes of non-naturalistic color bounded by dark contour lines — a style he called Synthetism. His palette is saturated and expressive: deep carmines, cadmium yellows, tropical greens, and acid blue-purples.