Van Gogh Never Saw His Own Face

Van Gogh painted himself about 35 times, and every time he worked from a mirror. So every self-portrait shows his face reversed, the way only he ever saw it. His bandaged ear gives it away. Then a 1977 study shows the same thing is true of you: you prefer your mirror face, and your friends prefer the real one. SOURCES Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait, 1887: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3262 (public domain) Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, 1887 / The Potato Peeler, 1885: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 67.187.70a/b (Open Access) Daguerreotypes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: number of self-portraits The Courtauld Gallery, London: Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (label); Van Gogh's description of his face to his sister Letter to Theo van Gogh, Saint-Rémy, 5 or 6 September 1889 (trans. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger) Mita, Dermer & Knight, "Reversed facial images and the mere-exposure hypothesis", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1977) Music: Kimiko Ishizaka, The Open Goldberg Variations (CC0) https://archive.org/details/OpenGoldb...