As a young ama­teur painter and future art school dropout, I fre­quent­ly found myself haunt­ed by the faces of two artists, that famous­ly odd cou­ple from my favorite art his­to­ry novelization—and Kirk Dou­glas role and Iggy Pop song—Lust for Life. Vin­cent van Gogh and Paul Gau­guin, above and below respec­tive­ly, the tor­ment­ed Dutch fanat­ic and burly French bully—how, I still won­der, could such a pair have ever co-exist­ed, how­ev­er briefly? How could such beau­ti­ful­ly skewed visions of life have exist­ed at all? Van Gogh and Gauguin’s sev­er­al self-por­traits still inspire won­der. My younger self had the lux­u­ry of see­ing these par­tic­u­lar two up close and in per­son at the Nation­al Gallery of Art in Wash­ing­ton, DC: Van Gogh’s gaunt and pierc­ing vis­age, Gauguin’s sneer­ing self-par­o­dy. Now, thanks to the won­ders of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, my old­er self, and yours, can view and down­load high-res­o­lu­tion pho­tos of both paint­ings, and over 60,000 more from the museum’s vast hold­ings, through NGA Images, “a repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tal images of the col­lec­tions of the Nation­al Gallery of Art.” There you’ll …