Portrait of Vincent van Gogh (1887)

Executed in pastel in 1887 and now at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, this famous portrait of Vincent van Gogh captures the Dutch artist at Agostina Segatori's café Le Tambourin, where Lautrec and van Gogh both drank and socialised during their overlapping Paris years. The two artists met in 1886 at Cormon's atelier and developed a genuine friendship and mutual respect. Van Gogh appears lost in thought or slightly troubled, the pastel rendering his distinctive red hair and beard. The portrait is an important historical document of the extraordinary concentration of talent in Paris's avant-garde community of the late 1880s.

The pastel medium allows a coloured, luminous rendering of van Gogh's distinctive red-orange hair against the dark background of the café interior. The technique is looser and more atmospheric than Lautrec's characteristic oil work, the pastel strokes contributing a softening effect to his usually sharp characterisation.