Paul Ricoeur's attempt, in 'Oneself as Another,' to overcome the perennial self-other opposition, and his account of a constitutionally unstable self, lacking a 'core', are suggestive for discussion of the relationship between viewer and painting, specifically with reference to portraiture. So selfhood and the practice of painting come into unusual conjunction in these works.
A painter who regularly took reproduced images as his sources, he chose in this unique case the self-portrait of another artist, and used - also uniquely - methods evidently akin to those of 'action painting'. They are exceptional in his work, both as to subject and in the way they are painted.
In 1957, Francis Bacon rapidly painted a series of five numbered paintings after van Gogh's 'Self-Portrait on the Road to Tarason,' to fill an exhibition.
