Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Self-portraits by European Males (1517-1888)

Hans Burgkmair
Self-portrait
1517
drawing
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
(false Dürer monogram added at a later date)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Self-portrait
1570
drawing
Národní Galerie, Prague

"But a far more vexing question remained.  Even supposing that a portrait did present a true likeness  as could be assumed in the case of those to be seen on coins and medals  what, if anything, could this tell one about the character of the man or woman whose features were recorded?  The question had struck him first in Modena, a month or so before he began to visit the Uffizi with such assiduity.  Looking at a bronze coin which portrayed Marcus Agrippa, the powerful collaborator of Augustus in establishing the Roman Empire, Gibbon noted: "I believed that I could read in the features of Agrippa those qualities of frankness, grandeur and simplicity which characterized this respectable man: but observations of this kind, although they have been sanctioned by Addison, strike me as very hollow.  Is it so common for a man's soul to be legible in his features?  I would like to hear of some ignorant person who, on being shown a head of Nero, would exclaim "There's a scoundrel!"  It is so easy for the scholar who already knows that he was one."    

 from History and Its Images by Francis Haskell, quoting a journal entry written in 1764 by Edward Gibbon during an Italian research-expedition for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 

Joachim Wtewael
Self-portrait
1601
oil on panel
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Carel Fabritius
Self-portrait
1645
oil on panel
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Bartholomeus van der Helst
Self-portrait
1655
oil on canvas
Toledo Museum of Art

Michiel van Musscher
Self-portrait
1685
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anton Raphael Mengs
Self-portrait in youth
1740
drawing
Kupferstich Kabinett, Dresden

Johan Zoffany
Self-portrait as David with the head of Goliath
1756
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

"French art critics of the 1750s and 1760s were troubled by what seemed to them the highly questionable status of portraiture in their time.  One objection frequently raised was that almost all contemporary portraits required the exercise of merely mechanical skills and so were unworthy of serious consideration as works of art.  Another objection was that most of the those who commissioned portraits of themselves were relatively obscure and unimportant persons whose likenesses could be of interest only to their friends.  But there, was, I suggest, still another source of critical misgiving  the inherent theatricality of the genre.  More nakedly and as it were categorically than the conventions of any other genre, those of the portrait call for exhibiting a subject, the sitter, to the public gaze; put another way, the basic action depicted in a portrait is the sitter's presentation of himself or herself to be beheld.  It follows that the portrait as a genre was singularly ill equipped to comply with the demand that a painting negate or neutralize the presence of the beholder, a demand I have tried to show became a matter of urgent, if for the most part not fully conscious, concern for French art critics during these years."

 Michael Fried, from Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (University of California Press, 1980)

Allan Ramsay
Self-portrait
1756
pastel
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin
Self-portrait
1771
pastel
Louvre

Johann David Passavant
Self-portrait with beret before Roman landscape
1818
oil on panel
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

George Richmond
Self-portrait
1830s
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Arnold Böcklin
Self-portrait with Death fiddling
1872
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Vincent van Gogh
Self-portrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin
1888
oil on canvas
Harvard Art Museums

"That resplending Image thou seest, was made for eternizing the memory of my portraiture, as I was alive."

– William Lithgow, from The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of Long Nineteen Yeares Travayles (1632)