Self-Portrait with Felt Hat (1887-88) Oil on canvas (44 x 37.5 cm) Vincent Van Gogh Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam, Netherlands Recorded October 15, 1994

With the air around his head pulsing with airborne energy, Van Gogh hints at the troubled audio terrain ("the little voices") that beset his gray matter. While here he shows his left ear for our inspection, less than a year after finishing this work Van Gogh would present a freshly detached portion of the same ear at a brothel in Arles. Even if the eyes are the window to the soul, here that soul is made aural and found in the shards of an oil-preserved field of sound.