Self-portrait

Vincent van Gogh, Self-portrait without beard, end September 1889, (F 525), Oil on canvas, 40 × 31 cm., Private collection. This may have been Van Gogh's last self-portrait. Given as a birthday gift to his mother.[1]
Self-portrait by Judith Leyster, a Dutch Golden Age painter, mostly of genre subjects. NGA, 1630. In reality, she probably did not wear expensive clothes like these while painting.

A self-portrait is a portrait of an artist made by themselves. Although self-portraits have been made since the earliest times, the practice of self-portraiture only gaining momentum in the Early Renaissance in the mid-15th century that artists can be frequently identified depicting themselves as either the main subject, or as important characters in their work. With better and cheaper mirrors, and the advent of the panel portrait, many painters, sculptors and printmakers tried some form of self-portraiture. Portrait of a Man in a Turban by Jan van Eyck of 1433 may well be the earliest known panel self-portrait.[2] He painted a separate portrait of his wife, and he belonged to the social group that had begun to commission portraits, already more common among wealthy Netherlanders than south of the Alps. The genre is venerable, but not until the Renaissance, with increased wealth and interest in the individual as a subject, did it become truly popular.[3]

By the Baroque period, most artists with an established reputation at least left drawings of themselves. Printed portraits of artists had a market, and many were self-portraits. They were also sometimes given as gifts to family and friends. If nothing else, they avoided the need to arrange for a model, and for the many professional portrait-painters, a self-portrait kept in the studio acted as a demonstration of the artist's skill for potential new clients. The unprecedented number of self-portraits by Rembrandt, both as paintings and prints, made clear the potential of the form, and must have further encouraged the trend.

  1. ^ Pickvance (1986), 131
  2. ^ Campbell, Lorne (1998). The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings. National Gallery Catalogues (new series). pp. 212–17. ISBN 1-85709-171-X.
  3. ^ accessed online July 28, 2007 an online history of self-portraits, various excerpts from Edward Lucie-Smith and Sean Kelly, The Self Portrait: A Modern View (London: Sarema Press, 1987) Archived September 3, 2006, at the Wayback Machine

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