Van Gogh painted his first surviving self-portrait in 1886. The work dates from his first year in Paris, where he began concentrating seriously on painting and studying modern artistic approaches.
Before Paris, Van Gogh had produced portraits and figure studies, but no earlier self-portrait is securely known to survive. In Paris, he used himself as an immediately available model, avoiding the expense of hiring sitters while practicing facial structure, brushwork, and color. His early Paris self-portraits are generally more restrained than the vivid, highly recognizable works he later made in Arles and Saint-Rémy.
The date can cause confusion because Van Gogh created dozens of self-portraits across several years. Many famous examples belong to 1887 or 1888, and his rapidly changing style makes the sequence easy to mix up. One disputed painting has sometimes been proposed as earlier, but the accepted first surviving self-portrait belongs to 1886.