The Mystery of Vincent van Gogh’s Photos

The portrait you see on the right is an oil painting by Van Gogh, completed in December 1886. The photograph (on the left) was also taken in 1886. Weird similarity, isn’t it?

Also, recently a melainotype from 1887 showing six men drinking around a table was discovered. It may include a rare sighting of Vincent with Paul Gauguin (at far right) and Émile Bernard (second from the left). However, the photo expert at the Van Gogh Museum said it can’t be the artist “because it simply does not look like him”. Others note that Van Gogh never mentions the gathering in his letters in which he described all the details of his life. The photograph was put up for auction but it did not meet its asking price of $136,000.

Even more recently, Italian art historian Antonio De Robertis claimed to identify Vincent in this Edmond Bénard photo of 34 men posing together at the Académie Julian in Paris in 1888. According to De Robertis, the men in the photograph include Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, as well as Andries Bonger, friend and brother-in-law to Theo van Gogh.

However, this is another unconfirmed likeness.

So, if we don’t have any photos and cannot be sure what van Gogh looked like as an adult, what do we have?

We have 34 painted self-portraits and 4 drawings. That’s quite a number!