When the light of day had faded and he could no longer see the paper to write, Gauguin would get up to sit at his harmonium, playing into the dark. Ky Dong was sad to see his friend Gauguin depressed, spending long days peering through his spectacles to write down obsessive thoughts and seeming to have given up on making pictures. Ky Dong was no artist, but one day he took up a position at the easel and started, or pretended to start, to make a portrait of Gauguin.
This had the desired provocative effect of launching him from his bed to grab the brush from Ky Dong, take up a mirror and finish the portrait himself. It was his last self-portrait. Innovative as ever, Self-Portrait, 1903 looks forward, as well as back. Forward to his own death, back to the Graeco-Roman mummy portraits from Roman Egypt that he had seen decades ago in the Louvre, and that now he was referencing while he forged another link in the chain. He portrayed himself to the funerary formula: full face, limited colour palette, short Roman haircut, antique tunic, exaggerated highlights on forehead, cheek and throat. His temples are grizzled; his eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles are thoughtful and calm, as though fixed on another world. He gave the picture to Ky Dong.
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