In February 1886, Van Gogh leaves for Paris to live with his brother Theo. Through him he gets into contact with such progressive contemporaries as Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Emile Bernard. Influenced by their work, he experiments with various styles and colours, in the self-portraits he paints during this period, among other things. During his two years in Paris, he makes about twenty-five of them, more than in any other period in his career. One explanation might be that he probably did not have money to hire models and therefore used himself as a model instead.
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