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Self Portraits

There scarcely lives or breaths an artist who hasn't, at one time or another, tried his hand at painting a self-portrait. I did my first one back in 1968 as a brash, young, 22-year-old amateur from a colour, portrait-quality photo back at a time when colour portrait photography was only just beginning to arrive. It was one of the best paintings I'd ever done at the time. I framed it, wrapped it up, and gave it to my wife as a Christmas gift just a few months before we became engaged. Six months later, she married me anyway.

Albrecht Dürer saw himself as Christ-like. Raphael painted himself into his Greek tableau, The School of Athens, Leonardo is reputed to have secreted self-portraits in everything from the Mona Lisa to the Last Supper. Vincent van Gogh's series are more like psychoanalysis than art while Rembrandt grows old before our very eyes in his extended series of painted self-examinations.

One of the more interesting and original self-portraits was done by Michelangelo. It is a most horrifying exposure of a tortured soul. Drooping limply from the hand of a figure just below and to the right of Christ is the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, martyred by having been skinned alive. Given Michelangelo's peculiar psyche, it is little wonder he so identified with such a figure. Having punished a number of his art critics with recognisable likeness, damming them to hell as lost souls, Michelangelo lets us know that he does not see himself any more favourably than he does them with one of the most unflattering self-portraits any artist ever rendered.

contributed by Lane, Jim


29 January 1998

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Self Portraits
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Works  
Autorretrato (David Alfaro Siqueiros)
Between Clock and Bed (Edvard Munch)
Brown and Gold (James McNeill Whistler)
Characters and Caricaturas (William Hogarth)
Chateau Noir (Paul Cézanne)
Christ Enthroned between the Virgin and St John the Evangelist (Cenni di Pepi (Cimabue))
Clairvoyance (René Magritte)
Hand with Reflecting Sphere (Maurits Cornelis Escher)
M. Bertin (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait (David Hockney)
Myself, Portrait-Landscape (Henri Rousseau)
Portrait of a Man with a Moustache (Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini)
Portrait of the Artist (Gustave Courbet)
Portrait of the Artist with the Idol (Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin)
Presentation at the Temple (Andrea Mantegna)
Raphael and the Fornarina (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
Reflection (Lucien Freud)
Saint Luke as a Painter before Christ on the Cross (Francisco de Zurbarán)
Self Portrait (Giovanni Battista Piranesi)
Self Portrait (Joseph Mallord William Turner)
Self Portrait (Anton Raphael Mengs)
Self Portrait (Maurits Cornelis Escher)
Self Portrait (Corrado Giaquinto)
Self Portrait (Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael))
Self Portrait (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
Self Portrait (Anton Raphael Mengs)
Self Portrait (Hans Holbein (the Younger))
Self Portrait (Käthe Kollwitz)
Self Portrait (Thomas Gainsborough)
Self Portrait (Joseph Wright of Derby)
Self Portrait (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso)
Self Portrait (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
Self Portrait (Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson)
Self Portrait (Salvador Dali)
Self Portrait (Alfred Stieglitz)
Self Portrait (Antoine Coypel)
Self Portrait (Thomas Eakins)
Self Portrait (Diego Velázquez)
Self Portrait (Camille Pissarro)
Self Portrait (Jacques-Louis David)
Self Portrait (Vincent van Gogh)
Self Portrait (Piet Cornelis Mondrian)
Self Portrait (Eugène Delacroix)
Self Portrait (William Holman Hunt)
Self Portrait (Jean-Baptiste Greuze)
Self Portrait (Ernest Meissonier)
Self Portrait (Benjamin West)
Self Portrait (Amadeo Modigliani)
Self Portrait at Easel (François Boucher)
Self Portrait at the Easel (Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin)
Self Portrait, 1778 (Claude-Joseph Vernet)
Self- Portrait (Nicolas Poussin)
Self-Portrait (Tiziano Vecelli (Titian))
Self-Portrait (Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci (Perugino))
Self-portrait (Jean-Frédéric Bazille)
Self-Portrait (John Singer Sargent)
Self-portrait (Gustave Caillebotte)
Self-Portrait (Sir Anthony van Dyck)
Self-Portrait (Leonardo da Vinci)
Self-Portrait (Marc Chagall)
Self-Portrait (Henri Matisse)
Self-Portrait (Newell Convers Wyeth)
Self-Portrait (Edward Hopper)
Self-Portrait (Giorgio Barbarelli (Giorgione))
Self-Portrait (Domenikos Theotokopoulos (El Greco))
Self-Portrait (Judith Leyster)
Self-Portrait (John Singleton Copley)
Self-portrait (Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto))
Self-Portrait (Roy Lichtenstein)
Self-Portrait (Francisco José de Goya Y Lucientes)
Self-Portrait as a Huntsman (Alexandre François Desportes)
Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (Artemisia Gentileschi)
Self-Portrait as Winter (Rosalba Carriera)
Self-Portrait at the Age of 24 (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (Girolamo Francesco Mazolla (Parmigianino))
Self-Portrait in Profile (Annibale Carracci)
Self-Portrait with a Burning Cigarette (Edvard Munch)
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Head (Vincent van Gogh)
Self-Portrait with Hat (Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas)
Self-Portrait with Soft Hat (Paul Cézanne)
Self-Portrait, 1751 (Maurice Quentin de la Tour)
Self-Portrait, 1781 (George Stubbs)
Sick Bacchus (Michelangelo Merisi (Caravaggio))
The Artist (Kazimir Severinovich Malevich)
The Four Philosophers (Peter Paul Rubens)
The Painter and his Pug (William Hogarth)
The Painter in his Studio (Pietro Longhi)
The Painter's Studio (Gustave Courbet)
The Source (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres)
The South Sea Scheme (William Hogarth)
Triple Self Portrait (Norman Rockwell)
We Are All Light and Energy (Audrey Flack)
 

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