Van Gogh Painted Himself as a Shaven-Headed Japanese Monk in the Self-Portrait He Sent to Paul Gauguin

9 min read

In September 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted himself as a shaven-headed Japanese monk in the self-portrait he sent to Paul Gauguin. He called the figure a bonze, the French word for a Buddhist monk, cropped his own hair to stubble, and set his ash-pale face against a luminous pale-green ground. It is one of the strangest acts of self-invention in nineteenth-century art.

He was thirty-five and living in the Yellow House in Arles, in the south of France. Money was short. Gauguin had agreed, after months of coaxing, to come south and share the studio. Van Gogh wanted a portrait ready to give him on arrival. So he did what no other European painter of his generation had done: he looked in the mirror and decided to become someone else entirely, a worshipper in a religion he had assembled out of woodblock prints.

September 1888, Arles: The Portrait He Called a Bonze

The evidence is in Van Gogh's own hand. In Letter 697 to his brother Theo, written that September, Vincent describes a third self-portrait and explains that he conceived of the sitter as a bonze, a simple worshipper of the eternal Buddha. That single word tells you how to read the picture. This is not a Dutch painter recording his tired face. It is a costume, a role, a deliberate spiritual disguise.

He shaved the hair to a stubble because monks do. He narrowed his own eyes, giving them what he called a slightly Japanese slant, and he drained the skin to an ash tone that reads as fasting and self-denial rather than health. The meaning of the Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin lives in that transformation. Van Gogh treated the making of art as a monastic vocation, and he wanted a face that said so before Gauguin ever walked through the door.

Why a Japanese Monk? Van Gogh's Imagined Japan

Van Gogh never went to Japan. He built the entire country in his head out of ukiyo-e prints, illustrated novels, and the enthusiasm of Paris dealers. During his two years in Paris he had collected hundreds of Japanese woodblocks, and by the time he reached the south he had convinced himself that Provence, with its hard light and flat fields, was Europe's own Japan.

That period of discovery is visible in the work he made on the hill above the city. His 1887 view from Montmartre already shows a painter loosening his line and flattening his colour toward the Japanese model he admired.

He believed Japanese artists lived like monks: simply, spiritually, in harmony with nature, trading pictures among themselves as gifts rather than commodities. The exchange habit fascinated him. He suggested Gauguin and Emile Bernard each paint a self-portrait and swap, and both agreed. Painting himself as a bonze was Van Gogh signing up to that imagined brotherhood in the most literal way he could, by putting on its face.

Ash Skin, Pale Green Ground: How the Colour Carries the Idea

Strip away the biography and the picture still works because of two colours. Van Gogh set an ash-toned, almost bloodless complexion against a light, luminous green background, and the contrast does the argument for him. Green pushes forward and cools the flesh, so the head seems to float in an atmosphere of calm rather than sit in a room.

He wrote of wanting an air of monastic severity, and the palette delivers it without a single prop. No incense, no robe, no shrine. Just a face pared down to discipline. This is where Van Gogh the colourist and Van Gogh the believer meet, and it is the reason the canvas rewards slow looking. The green is not decoration. It is the sound of a quiet room.

Readers who want to trace how far his palette could travel in a single year can follow it into the blazing star-filled sky of the same period, told in our study of Van Gogh's 1889 Starry Night and its swirling night sky. The bonze portrait and that night view sit only months apart, yet they show a painter pushing colour toward two opposite temperatures.

The Swap with Gauguin: Les Miserables for a Bonze

The trade actually happened. Van Gogh sent his bonze to Gauguin, and Gauguin sent back his own self-portrait, the one he titled after Victor Hugo's novel, Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard (Les Miserables). Two painters, two masks. Gauguin cast himself as Hugo's hunted convict Jean Valjean; Van Gogh cast himself as a monk. Neither man painted the truth of his own face, and that was the point.

Comparing Van Gogh's bonze with Gauguin's Les Miserables tells you almost everything about the friendship that was about to ignite and collapse in Arles. Van Gogh reached for serenity and self-erasure. Gauguin reached for the romantic outlaw. Within months the two would be sharing the Yellow House, arguing about art nightly, and heading toward the December crisis that ended their experiment. The portraits were the opening move.

Van Gogh kept painting the people of Arles through that whole volatile stretch. His postman, Joseph Roulin, sat for him again, and the portraits carry the same frontal honesty and saturated colour he had rehearsed on his own monkish face.

Where the Original Hangs: Harvard's Fogg Museum

The Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin now belongs to the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, held in the Fogg Museum collection. It is one of the anchor works in the museum's holding of nineteenth-century French and Dutch painting, and it travels rarely. To stand in front of it is to see the ash skin and pale green ground register far more forcefully than any screen conveys.

The idea of the artist as a figure set apart, withdrawn from ordinary life, runs through Van Gogh's later years too. He returned to it in the confined, penitential world he painted after his breakdown, a mood we trace in the story of how Van Gogh painted The Prison Courtyard during his confinement, copying a Dore engraving of Newgate. The bonze's monastic severity and the prison yard's circling inmates are two faces of the same withdrawal.

Living With the Arles Portraits

If the bonze self-portrait moved you, the works that belong in the same room are the ones painted in the same searching year. The withdrawal Van Gogh staged in his own face carried straight into the walls of the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he painted the chapel and grounds during his voluntary confinement in 1889. That green-and-ochre view of a place of retreat rhymes exactly with the monastic mood of the portrait.

For a living room, the postman's warm frontal portrait carries a room on its own and pairs naturally with the self-portrait, since both are Arles heads built from the same saturated palette. A print of the bonze self-portrait itself suits a study or a reading corner, where its calm green ground quietly settles the space; it is available in several standardized formats to match different walls. Van Gogh sits inside a wider Post-Impressionist story you can follow through our collection of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism art prints. For a reminder of how far his self-image travelled, compare the ascetic monk of 1888 with the darker, mortal joke of his earlier Antwerp study.

Two years separate the smirking skeleton from the fasting monk. Both are Van Gogh testing what a face can be made to mean.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Van Gogh's Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gauguin depict?

It shows Van Gogh reimagining himself as a bonze, a Buddhist monk, with shaved stubble hair and slightly slanted eyes. He set his ash-pale face against a luminous pale-green ground to suggest monastic severity and devotion to art.

Where can you see the original self-portrait today?

The original hangs at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, held in the Fogg Museum collection. It is a cornerstone of the museum's nineteenth-century French and Dutch painting holdings and rarely travels.

Why did Van Gogh paint himself as a Japanese monk?

Van Gogh idealised Japan, which he knew only through woodblock prints. He believed Japanese artists lived like monks, simply and spiritually, and painting himself as a bonze signalled his own devotion to art as a religious vocation.

How did the portrait exchange with Gauguin work?

Van Gogh proposed that he, Gauguin, and Emile Bernard swap self-portraits like Japanese printmakers. He sent his bonze to Gauguin and received Gauguin's Self-Portrait with Portrait of Emile Bernard, subtitled Les Miserables, in return.

Which period of Van Gogh's life produced this self-portrait?

He painted it in September 1888 in Arles, in the Yellow House, while preparing for Gauguin to join him. It belongs to his most intense southern period, months before the December crisis that ended their partnership.