Self-portrait with hat

Self-Portrait with Hat (1893-94) at the Musée d'Orsay was painted during Gauguin's difficult period of European readjustment between his two Tahitian stays. He had returned from Tahiti in August 1893 with seventy-four canvases, expecting commercial success, and found instead mixed critical reception and ongoing financial difficulty. His self-portrait with hat projects a deliberate bohemian dandyism — the large felt hat associated with the romantic artist-outsider, the worldly expression of a man who has been to the Pacific and back and knows his own worth even if Paris does not fully recognize it yet. He was constructing a public persona as much as documenting a physical likeness, and the Orsay's possession of this self-portrait alongside others from different phases of his career shows how consciously he managed his image throughout his life. It was painted at the same time he was organizing his solo exhibition at Durand-Ruel that would introduce the Tahitian work to a Paris audience for the first time.

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.