Schmidt-Rottluff's self-portrait, with its colors squeezed straight from the paint tubes, actually seems closer to the spirit of Van Gogh. A young painter associated with Die Brücke, Schmidt-Rottluff painted it in a sort of dueling self-portrait session with Emil Nolde, on a summer visit to Nolde's remote Baltic island home of Alsen. Nolde had seen Van Gogh's Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear and Pipe in Berlin and thought it was "a bit crazy." But Schmidt-Rottluff's picture has a psychological depth and a probing honesty, with those very prosaic glasses, that seem neither crazy nor self-dramatizing.