Self

On self portraits

No creative prompts today. Just some musings on a Favourite Thing of mine.

Etymology of ‘self’ from etymonline.com.

“Old English self, sylf (West Saxon), seolf (Anglian), ‘one’s own person, -self; own, personal; same, identical…” - etymonline.com

Over the years I have collected images of self-portraits and have often wondered what it was that drew me to them. Recently I think I figured out why I find them so fascinating.

I find self portraits fascinating because, I think, of the quality of gaze that the artist captures. They are not only a capturing of a likeness, but also a subtle record of something of the attitude or mood of the artist while they painted themselves.

This varies according to the artist and the circumstances they were working in.

‘Self-portrait in a straw hat’ (1782) shows Elisabeth Louise Vigee Lebrun gazing with relaxed and supreme confidence out of the canvas. Regarded as one of the most eminent portraitists of her age (Marie Antoinette was one of her subjects), she enjoyed career success at a time when few women artists did. She has a right to be proud in this painting.

Contrast this with ‘Self-portrait with red hat’ (1968) by Leonor Fini. This is another assertive woman but I would describe her as look as one of defiance rather than the quietly suave confidence of Madame Lebrun. In a blog about her on the #WomensArt blog she is quoted as saying:

“I always imagined I would have a life very different from the one that was imagined for me, but I understood from a very early time that I would have to revolt in order to make that life.”

In her ‘Self portrait as the allegory of painting’ (1638-1639), Artemisia Gentileschi – another bolshie woman – demonstrates her right to assert herself as a painter using a different approach. The canvas shows her busily doing what she wanted to do: painting. Moreover, during a time when nubile nymphs were used by male artists to allegorically depict the arts, a self-portrait showing a fully clad woman artist hard at work must have made quite a statement.

A very different painting from Artemisia’s self-portrait, in style and tone, is Edvard Munch’s ‘Self-portrait during the eye disease’ (1930) which was painted while the artist was recovering from a haemorrhage in one eye. I can only imagine the affect that a loss of vision would have on an artist; Munch’s expressionistic depiction of how he saw the world is unsparingly honest.

And if the etymology of the word ‘self’ goes back to an Old English word meaning ‘one’s own person’ then what are we to do with the self-portraits of Vincent Van Gogh, an artist who painted wonderful portraits of a self that he was to annihilate through suicide.

And some self-portraits depict artists flicking an assessing gaze at themselves as they seek to make a portrait of a portraitist. I think you can see this in this painting (1938) by Nora Heysen as she coolly appraises her own self as a subject.

Or in this self-portrait (1864) by Paul Cezanne – he captures himself soberly looking up from his work, deep in concentration.

And I love this. I love the tension between the fact that most of these self-portraits capture that moment when an artist meets their own gaze, and how that gaze reflects the artist as both image-taker and subject – the gazer and the ‘gazee’, so to speak. I love how this artist’s gaze in self-portraits is both ‘in the moment’ but how also the rendering of that moment is obviously the result of many hours of sketching and painting.

Layered into that artist / subject gaze is a complexity that does not exist in the Instagrammed selfies of the digital age. The capturing of ‘self’, as opposed to the claiming of places and parties as social media trophies, the rendering of “one’s own person” as a self-portrait takes care and skill and discernment and we get a glimpse of these things in the gaze of the artist / subject.

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I have put up some other self portraits in this Substack Chat. Have a look and add your own.

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