No longer comfortable with Pont-Aven, Gauguin moved on to Le Pouldu with his friend and student Meijer de Haan and a small group of artists.

He stayed for several months in the autumn of 1889 and the summer of 1890, where the group spent their time decorating the interior of Marie Henry's inn with every major type of art work.

The painting shows Gauguin against a red background with a halo above his head and apples hanging beside him as he holds a snake in his hand while plants or flowers appear in the foreground.

American banker Chester Dale acquired the painting in 1928, gifting it upon his death in 1962 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) was a French Post-Impressionist artist and figure in the Symbolist movement known for his contributions to the Synthetist style.

Gauguin's Self-Portrait was prepared along with its pendant, Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan (1889), to the right and left respectively of a fireplace on the upper panels of two wooden cupboard doors.

[5][7][9] French art historian Françoise Cachin notes that Gauguin designed both Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake and its companion piece Portrait of Jacob Meyer de Haan as a caricature.

[2][11] Curator Philip Conisbee observes the religious symbolism in the images, noting that the "apples and snake refer to the Garden of Eden, temptation, sin, and the Fall of Man.

[15] Two books appear on the table in de Haan's portrait: Paradise Lost (1667–74) by seventeenth-century English poet John Milton, and Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle.

These respective literary allusions, to Milton's Satan and to Carlyle's Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a character described as both angelic and diabolical, play directly into de Haan's and Gauguin's corresponding self-portraits.

[2] In 1919, Marie Henry sold Gauguin's Self-Portrait as part of a batch of 14 other works to François Norgelet for a total of 35,000 francs, where it was exhibited at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris.