Youthful vulnerability: Stanley Spencer’s Self-portrait, 1914
His diminutive stature—he was 5ft 2in —had excluded him from military service when, in 1914, Stanley Spencer embarked on this 1½ times life size self-portrait. He wrote that, in devising his approach, he was inspired by seeing Bernardino Luini’s Christ Among the Doctors, of about 1515–30, in the National Gallery. The impact of his encounter with this High Renaissance masterpiece was that Spencer felt compelled to attempt the first of a number of self-portraits: ‘I fight against it, but I cannot avoid it,’ he wrote. The 23year-old painter created an image of arresting confidence, making bold use of chiaroscuro and, despite the impassiveness of his expression, a strong and direct gaze. Later self-portraits, such as the unsettling Self-portrait, Adelaide Road of 1939 or Spencer’s ‘naked portraits’, were less conventional, but this early work remains powerful in its combination of physical vigour and youthful vulnerability.
remains current almost 400 years later. On the wall behind Beale is her wooden palette; also pointing to her calling, her right hand rests upon a canvas. The canvas in question, however, is not one of the paintings on which her considerable reputation rested. It depicts her two sons, no more than a sketch in oils for private enjoyment. In Beale’s self-portrait, the Restoration painter proclaims her status as working mother and the two sides of her life: domestic and artistic. The loose swathes of her dress recall the shimmering finery of her sitters, but her facial features lack the teasing glamour typical of contemporary portraits. Work created a duality in Beale’s life absent from the butterfly existences of Court beauties. Her family’s principal breadwinner, her husband, Charles, acted as her assistant. Beale worked right up to her death in 1699, although her style had become outmoded, demand lessened and family circumstances were straitened. Hers is selfportraiture without self-congratulation.
A Puritan by upbringing, mistrustful of vanity, Beale did not dwell on her appearance or, unduly, what it meant to be an artist. Two centuries later, Paul Gauguin’s self-reflection suggests both narcissism and inner conflict.
Of one self-portrait painted in the late 1880s, Gauguin mused that it captured ‘the face of an outlaw… with an inner nobility and gentleness’: his, he concluded, was a face that was a ‘symbol of the contemporary Impressionist painter’. He went further, dwelling on ideas of the artist as an outsider, describing his portrait as ‘a portrait of all wretched victims of society’. Subsequent generations of viewers have reached varied conclusions. Gauguin’s arresting Self-portrait with a Halo and a Snake of 1889, originally painted on a cupboard door in the dining room of a Breton inn, is simultaneously introverted and flaunting in its harsh ironies. The long face is apparently unrelated to the brightly coloured background. The inclusion of his right hand seems to point to Gauguin’s vocation, but the hand is disembodied and a snake weaves between his painting fingers.
All portraiture is a bid for immortality: self-portraiture is no exception
In other instances, self-portraits engage with a concept of self that is not defined by the painter’s craft. Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Gauguin and Frida Kahlo painted their own image repeatedly—in Rembrandt’s case, on more than 90 occasions —public-private meditations the primary aim of which was not to proclaim a sense of vocation. Dürer’s Self-portrait with Gloves of 1498 explicitly denies the artist’s working life: his soft leather gloves, like his theatrical black-and-white costume, suggest that any form of working life is impossible for this curly-haired youth, who regards the viewer with wary directness in an expression that tells us nothing of his thoughts, hopes and dreams. When, two years later, Dürer returned to self-portraiture, he drew inspiration from images of Christ—and, indeed, the finished painting would be used by future artists as a model for paintings of Christ. But in this startling, Christ-like image, in which our attention is distracted by the sitter’s minutely observed, extraordinary coiling ringlets of hair, Dürer is again a blank. Unlike sacred art, his painted face offers no suggestion of a connection with the viewer beyond eye contact.
All portraiture is a bid for immortality, preserving and perpetuating an exterior and a life that are finite: self-portraiture is no exception. Rembrandt’s many self-portraits span his whole career. Some 350 years after his death, his last-painted self-portraits move us with their seeming honesty and the
candour of their charting of a life’s trajectory. But they also bestow on this greatest of Dutch Masters an enduring identity and fame. Rembrandt was real and important to himself and remains real for posterity, thanks to these images that chronicle both achievements and disappointments. Over and again, unconstrained by any but his own vanities, Rembrandt painted the face he knew best in the world. The result is that we believe we know him now.