Why collectors pay above face value for self-portraits
Selfportraits are seen as expressions of the artist’s soul
Aself-portrait is more accurate than a portrait by another artist,” says Alison Smith, the chief curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, where the BP portrait award exhibition is about to open. “The level of self-scrutiny is more intense.” She should know; she is surrounded by some of the greatest portraits and selfportraits in British art.
Sometimes, a self-portrait is better than anything else an artist does, and the market concurs. Take the relatively small circa 1640 selfportrait of Anthony van Dyck that was nearly spirited away across the Atlantic in 2013, after Philip Mould, the art dealer, bought it on behalf of a Canadian client at auction for a record £8.3 million – the previous record for a Van Dyck was less than half of that: £3.1 million for a painting of a rearing stallion. A national campaign helped to raise the £10 million it then cost to keep the self-portrait in Britain and in the National Portrait Gallery, where it is one of the most popular exhibits.
In the case of professional portraitists such as Van Dyck,
“[a self-portrait] allowed them to be expressive in a way that was inappropriate in formal portraiture,” says Mould. “Collectors often perceive them as having a higher artistic
validity than commissioned portraits – as psychological expressions of the artist’s soul.”
Self-portraits by leading artists seem to attract super wealthy collectors. In the modern field, one thinks of Stavros Niarchos, the Greek shipping tycoon, who, in 1989, paid a record $47.9 million for Yo, Picasso – an early work by the Spanish artist. Nine years later, Niarchos’s elder son, Philip, paid $71.5 million for a self-portrait by Van Gogh in which the artist is without his usual beard, possibly the most expensive selfportrait ever sold at auction.
In the contemporary field, the record $57.3 million achieved in 2016 for the American graffiti artist Jean-michel Basquiat was for a selfportrait. And Jenny Saville’s massive self-portrait, Propped (1992), sold last year for £9 million – a record for a living female artist – reportedly to Alex Greenberg, the Russian billionaire.
Little wonder, then, that a leading gallery like Gagosian recently mounted an exhibition of self-portraits by artists that it regularly deals with – Bacon, Warhol, Saville included – in which they were hung in the elevated company of the world’s greatest self-portraitist: Rembrandt van Rijn. Examples of Rembrandt’s self-image are all too rare on the market. The last was snapped up in 2003 by Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas hotelier, for £7 million – ironically much less than works by the Gagosian triumvirate. At the Neue Galerie, New York, meanwhile, is an exhibition of German and Austrian selfportraits. Included is a superb work by Egon Schiele that belongs to Omer Koç, the chairman of Turkey’s biggest industrial company and reputedly owner of one of the biggest selfportrait collections in the world. Also in the exhibition is Max Beckmann’s Self-portrait with Horn (1938), which created a sensation at auction in New York in 2001, when it quintupled estimates to sell for a record $22.5 million to Ronald Lauder, the cosmetics heir.
Below the stratosphere, selfportraits that bring out the best in an artist can also make records. At Cheffins, Cambridge, in
March, a 1938 self-portrait by Rodrigo Moynihan estimated at £400 sold for a record £11,500 to Jack Wakefield, the private dealer, who said the painting had reminded him of a Rembrandt. He then tried – unsuccessfully – to buy a self-portrait by the underrated David
Tindle, at Chiswick Auctions this time, that ended up selling for a record £17,500 – far above its £2,000 estimate.
Tindle is one of the artists whose work features in the Ruth Borchard Collection – the largest private collection of 20th century selfportraits in Britain. Borchard, a German Jewish refugee from Nazism, began collecting self-portraits in 1958, as an extension of her interest in diaries and autobiographies. She wrote to every artist whose work she had seen and liked in various exhibitions, offering them no more than 21 guineas each for a work. She stopped when she had reached 100 works, in 1971.
After she died in 2000, her son, Richard, partnered with Piano Nobile, the London gallery, to form a parallel collection of 100 more recent selfportraits and to launch a bi-annual prize for selfportraiture, currently on show at Kings Place. In its first year, the prize was won by Celia Paul, the painter and model for Lucian Freud; and, coincidentally, the latest winner is David Dawson, long-time assistant to Freud and a highly respected painter in his own right.
It is hoped that one day, the whole Borchard collection will be open to the public.