Van Gogh painted this self-portrait in the winter of 1887-1888, when he had been living in Paris for almost two years. The work shows that he had studied the stippling technique of the pointillists and applied it in his own original way. The stripes of paint are placed in different directions. They follow the outline of his head and thus form a kind of halo.

The painting is one of Van Gogh’s most daring Parisian colour experiments. With long strokes of paint, he placed the complementary colors next to each other: blue and orange in the background, red and green in the beard and eyes. The colours reinforce each other’s effect. Due to the discoloration of the red pigment, the purple paint strokes are now blue, so that the contrast with the yellow is less strong.