Ahhh the self-portrait!!!

Sometimes I find self-portraits more interesting than a regular old painting because we get to see the genius behind the work. It's curious to see how the artist represents himself or herself. Are they shown with their 'tools'? Do they express an emotion? Or do they remain as enigmatic as before? I am bringing up self-portraits because I had to do my own for Drawing Studio. We used medium toned paper and black & white nu-pastels.


What does my own self-portrait say about me? Maybe I'm curious, contemplating the meaning of life and my purpose on this earth, or I'm just smiling ever so slightly because doing it more would hurt my face after a while. That's what it shows! A lazy couch slug!


Art history provides us with many wonderful self-portraits, a few of which I treasure! My first favorite self-portrait is of Durer, a Northern Renaissance artist (which means he wasn't in Italy but he was well known there!). After traveling to Italy, he picked up the tradition of the 'artist genius'. In Northern Renaissance, artists believed their talent came straight from God, while in Italy, they believed the talent was credited more to the artist and saw them as intellectuals. Durer liked the 'artist genius' and brought these views back with him. In his self-portrait, from 1500, he shows himself in a frontal pose, which had always been reserved for Christ. This way he is the artist genius and source of his own talent.


My second favorite self-portrait is of Rembrandt, a Dutch Baroque artist. He painted lots and lots of self-portraits, about 80 or so survive today. This provides us with good documentation of his life. In his earlier work, he is lively and young, but after his wife died, his portraits became more somber. His work is well known for having a psychological element.



My final favorite self-portrait (for now) is of Angelica Kauffman, an English neoclassical artist. Throughout the Renaissance and Baroque, there were not that many female artists. They painted still lifes and portraits and couldn't paint the nude figure. This makes Kauffman even more important to art history! She was seen as a prodigy at an early age and travel around Europe meeting the prominate art figures of the time. She was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Art in Britian, which opened 1668. Unlike most female artists, she didn't paint easy portraits but instead painted history paintings. In this self-portrait she is shown with two pupils. She always paints herself with her tools to show that she is a painter because many male artists said that a man painted the paintings for her. In this particular painting, there are no men, except for the marble bust of her father in the background. I love how she paints fabric so naturalistically.