The evolution of the facial features of the artist in Self-portrait with Yellow Christ reaches its climax together with the development of Gauguin’s savagery. In this painting the artist juxtaposes two of his recent works, Yellow Christ and the ceramic tobacco jar, with his own image, giving shape to a triptych which records his evolution towards complete savagery. Francoise Cachin proposed that the role of this self-portrait is to underline Gauguin’s split personality between divine and savage impulses, rather than the artist’s progression from human to savage. According to Cachin, compositionally, the two background works were included in order to develop and define the central figure, the self-portrait, in relation to the other two: the Christ symbolizing “the angelic” and the tobacco jar symbolizing the “grimacing, primitive self” (Cachin, 178). But is Cachin justified in allowing for the existence of the angelic component? If Gauguin himself refuted the double nature of Christ and asserted the latter’s full corporeality, why would the Yellow Christ now renounce its physicality and adopt a divine stance? Ichnographically, this self-portrait is a comprehensive frieze of all the standard facial features of Gauguin’s savage self, but it also announces the primeval brutality of Self-portrait near Golgotha (1896), painted after his first trip to Tahiti. Just like in the Self-portrait in Gethsemane the broken nose is an external expression of the more fundamental anomaly: savagery. Curiously, not even the crucified Yellow Christ is spared the stigma of this inner anomaly and by doing so Gauguin transformed Christ into a replica of his untamed self. However, this particularity of the nose attenuates in the tobacco jar, where the lack of refinement of shapes reflects Gauguin’s ultimate brutality. Similarly, the less precise contours of the cheekbones, moving towards the more unrefined quality of the Self-portrait near Golgotha, evoke the sturdiness of their primordial material and thus suggest the artist’s return to primitivism and bestiality. The eyes of the main figure, less elongated, and more swollen and scared, also stand as a proof of the emergent bestiality. However, the eyes of the Yellow Christ are completely closed, evoking the preceding state in Gethsemane, while the round, open eyes of the primitive tobacco jar foreshadow the subsequent total dehumanization.
At this point in his development Gauguin was diverging from inhuman grotesquerie and approaching non-human primitivism. Gone was any trace of humanity, even in its negative manifestations, as maliciousness. This progression of the artist’s savagery is suggested by the evolution of facial traits in the background self-portraits, those of the Yellow Christ alluding to the incipient forms of Gauguin’s savagery and those of the tobacco jar anticipating the primitivism and bestiality of the Self-portrait near Golgotha. Thus the Self-portrait with Yellow Christ, compositionally almost like a triptych, has a narrative function: through the change in facial features it testifies Gauguin’s transition from the lower levels of humanity to the subhuman and thus his defeat by his savagery. Moreover, a substantial change in Gauguin’s biography highlights the conquest of divinity by savagery: he first sought secluded places, though not totally isolated from civilization and in the end completely remote places where he could unleash his savagery. Simultaneously, the increasing degrees of savagery in the paintings coincide with a shift in the focus of his letters from excessive concern with himself and negative attitude towards others to a staggering fear of death and lonesomeness.