...The most affecting self portraits, of course, are those made in the artist's old age. The face that once held knowledge of life now holds the knowledge of extinction. Munch's desolate Self Portrait between the Clock and the Bed, Lovis Corinth's Last Self-Portrait, Bonnard's humbling portrait of himself in the bathroom mirror: for these artists such pictures mark the conclusion of the project of self-realization, an undertaking that appears to yield at its end an absolute certainty that there is nothing beyond the self and its death. By contrast, Van Gogh's late self portraits show a greater and greater objectivity, a kind of offering up of the ego to what is eternal in art itself, what Cumming brilliantly calls the "aura" of his paintings. "It is difficult to know yourself," Van Gogh wrote once in a letter, "but it isn't easy to paint yourself either." [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/19/review-laura-cumming-art-book]