Vincent Van Gogh's Painting With Tilt-shift Effect

Van Gogh created many self-portraits during his lifetime. He was a prolific self-portraitist, who painted himself thirty-seven times between 1886 and 1889. In all, the gaze of the painter is seldom directed at us; even when it is a fixed gaze, he seems to look elsewhere. The paintings vary in intensity and color and some portray the artist with beard, some beardless, some with bandages; representing the episode in which he severed one of his ears. Self-portrait without beard, from the end of September 1889, is one of the most expensive paintings of all time, selling for $71.5 million in 1998 in New York. At the time, it was the third (or an inflation-adjusted fourth) most expensive painting ever sold. All of the self-portraits Van Gogh executed in Saint-Rémy show the artist's head from the left, i.e. with the side opposite his mutilated ear, showing only his good side. Many of Van Gogh's self portraits are depicting his face as it appeared in a mirror i.e. his left side in the image is in reality the right side of his face. During the final weeks of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, although he was producing many paintings, Van Gogh did not paint any self-portraits.
A self-taught artist with little training, Van Gogh was anything but academic in his painting and drawing techniques. Recent research has shown that works commonly known as "oil paintings" or "drawings" would better be described as "mixed-media". The Langlois Bridge at Arles shows highly elaborate under-drawing in pen and ink, while several works from Saint-Rémy and Auvers, hitherto considered to be drawings or watercolors, such as Vestibule of the Asylum, Saint-Remy (September 1889), turned out to be painted in diluted oil and with a brush.