Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, Metropolitan Museum, 1887

The straw hat arrives in the summer of 1887, and with it a burst of short, hatched strokes in yellow, blue and pink. Turn the canvas over and you find The Potato Peeler, a dark 1885 study of a peasant woman linked to The Potato Eaters, so one piece of cloth holds both ends of his early career. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.