Self-portrait with Portrait of Bernard

Self-Portrait with Portrait of Bernard (Les misérables, 1888) at the Van Gogh Museum is a complex double work — Gauguin's own self-portrait incorporating a small portrait of Émile Bernard in the upper corner — painted and exchanged with Van Gogh before Gauguin's arrival at Arles. The two artists had been in correspondence for months, planning their Yellow House community, and the exchange of self-portraits was both a practical introduction and a statement of artistic alliance. Gauguin's choice to identify his self-portrait with the title 'Les misérables' — aligning himself with Victor Hugo's suffering, socially marginal heroes — was a deliberate act of self-mythologizing: the artist as criminal-saint, the misfit genius who exists outside bourgeois convention. The Van Gogh Museum's possession of this canvas alongside the Painter of Sunflowers portrait of Van Gogh and many works from their shared period makes it the primary institution for understanding the Gauguin-Van Gogh relationship.

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.