Self-Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary at The National Portrait Gallery 2005

Date: 23-10-2005
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010                  
Subject:   17th Century  18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Renaissance        

The year is 1433. Jan van Eyck is dressed in a dark fur-trimmed jacket over a white jerkin, a splendid red turban perched precariously on his head. He stares solemnly at his own reflection, the better to paint it. But as he looks at himself sideways in the mirror he notices that it is impossible for him, at this oblique angle, to see both of his own eyes in focus. He includes this fact of optics in the picture. He paints one eye, his left, in the sharpest imaginable register: so sharp that the light from his workshop’s north-facing window can be seen gleaming wetly in the white of it; so sharp that its fine pink tracery of capillary veins can be seen; so sharp, even, as to make visible the slight marbling of the grey-green iris where it comes closest to the pupil. He paints the other eye, by contrast, to look slightly blurred, using a technique that anticipates, by more than four centuries, the innovations of the French Impressionists – a skein of dabbed and dashed paint. Life is seen through a glass, darkly. Vision is veiled by the truancies of sight.

The picture is mildly disorientating, because what it shows is not just van Eyck looking at himself but van Eyck looking at the nature of looking. It may well have been a self-advertisment as well as a self-portrait, made to demonstrate the skill with which he could handle oil paint, still a new medium at the time. So skilful was he that a rumour went round the Burgundian court that van Eyck was no mere painter, but a practitioner of dark arts. The red turban certainly lends him the air of a necromancer, but the picture is also shot through with palpable morbidity. The painter notes the wrinkles around his eyes and the incipient six o’clock shadow of stubble at the line of his jaw – time’s passage made visible.

The self-portrait is a genre of art frequently touched by the spectre of death and attended by philosophical self-questioning. It is also, traditionally, a flaunt of skill. So it is apt that van Eyck’s work – which is all of those things – should hang at the start of the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition, “Self-Portrait”. The show assembles a little more than fifty examples of the genre, hung down the length of a long suite of galleries. The result is a kind of walk through the centuries, punctuated by encounters with remarkable men (and women). Van Eyck gives way to van Dyck and eventually to van Gogh, with Francis Bacon bringing up the rear. The hang is characterised by numerous abrupt transitions, but this is something that suits the inherent edginess of self-portraiture – the solitary mood of shifty self-scrutiny, adumbrated by Van Eyck, and subsequently taken to a pitch of near hysteria by the Romantics and the moderns. The exhibition resembles an identity parade, and parades widely differing notions of identity.

The enfilade-style hang was presumably inspired by the world’s most celebrated collection of self-portraits, begun in Florence by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1664. That collection is still displayed today in double file along the length of the “Vasari Corridor”, the rooftop passage connecting the Uffizi Galleries to the Pitti Palace. A number of pictures from it have been loaned to the National Portrait Gallery for the occasion of “Self-Portrait”. These include an exaggeratedly morbid likeness of the eighteenth-century painter Johann Zoffany, complete with hourglass and skull, as well as Annibale Carracci’s powerfully pathetic Self-Portrait on an Easel in a Workshop of around 1605. The latter was Carracci’s riposte to Michelangelo’s famous dictum that “we paint with our brains not our hands”, seeking to expose rather than conceal the sheer hard work of making art. The self-portrait is in effect a picture within the picture, stretched but unframed – not even finished – and set on an easel amid the dust and disarray of the artist’s studio. A cat and dog snarl at the viewer. Paint dries on a palette hung from a knob on that same easel. Carracci was a stoical, melancholic figure and this was his way of saying that man himself is like an unfinished picture – a work in progress, at least until his death.

The Old Master most thoroughly devoted to the act of self-representation, Rembrandt, said something similar but gave the statement a dramatic and even a distinctly Shakespearean twist by dressing himself up, one way or another, in nearly all of his depictions of himself. His self-portraits, whether as Eastern potentate, or as the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, or as a grizzled, toothless octogenarian, define man as an actor, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage. They also imply a kind of existential freedom by cumulatively asserting that anyone – but above all an artist, whose job it is to imagine himself into the lives of fabled others – can imaginatively encompass a world of different identities. The point is lost in this exhibition, however, because it only finds room for one Rembrandt, the National Gallery’s Self-Portrait at 34. Here he is on his best behaviour, posed decorously in the manner of Raphael’s famous portrait of Baldessare Castiglione – a picture which Rembrandt admired so much that he tried unsuccessfully to buy it at auction. Castiglione was known as the author of the best-selling Book of the Courtier, a Machiavellian guide to getting on and making a good impression in Renaissance high society. Posing as a Renaissance courtier reborn, Rembrandt made a claim for himself and, by extension, for the vocation of the artist. Painters can be gentlemen too.

The exhibition’s subtitle is “Renaissance to Contemporary”. But, van Eyck aside, it includes precious little in the way of Renaissance self-portraiture. There are reasons for this. Durer’s great Self-Portrait as Christ – not an act of blasphemy, but the artist’s pious attempt to discern the godliness held to lurk within lowly humanity – is too great a treasure for Munich’s Alte Pinakothek to have even considered lending. The same applies to Giorgione’s Self-Portrait in Braunschweig. Many other great Renaissance artists’ self-portraits are, in any case, incorporated into larger works and therefore immovable – Signorelli’s self-portrait as a devoutly shocked onlooker at the appearance of the Antichrist, in his fresco cycle in Orvieto Cathedral; Michelangelo’s grisly self-portrait as the flayed carcass of St Bartholomew, in his fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel.

This swings the balance of historical material, in the first half of the show, firmly towards the Baroque. The result is not, in any case, much of a distortion of the truth. The seventeenth century – the century of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Rubens and Bernini – was without doubt the first great age of the self-portrait. Rarely had artists had a stronger sense of theatre and never before had they had a greater sense of their own significance. By far the highest concentration of truly memorable pictures in “Self-Portrait” is to be found here: Anthony van Dyck’s double portrait of himself looking wistful in a garden with his well-fed friend and patron, Endymion Porter; Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, a work based on the writings of Pliny the Elder, in which seventeenth-century Rome’s most famously sexy female painter shows herself equally eager to display her erudition and her ample cleavage; Cristofano Allori’s stunningly melodramatic Judith with the Head of Holofernes, which is likewise an allegory, but this time of the perils of love, in that the artist has imagined his ex-girlfriend, armed with a sword, and decked out in acres of balloooning orange damasked silk, clutching his own severed head. Best of all is Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait in the persona of the surly stoic philosopher Diogenes, scowling at the world as he holds up a Latin epigram which can be loosely translated as “Put up or shut up”.

In the blink of an eye, it is the eighteenth century. Joshua Reynolds, hand shading his eyes from the sun, is staring into an uncertain future. William Hogarth, a puggishly determined and combative type, is alone in his studio toiling over a depiction of Thales, Muse of Comedy. Nearby, the Muse of Vanity floats into view. Madame Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, for it is she, wafts through a dream of nature wearing pretty silks and ribbons, and a feathered and flowered hat with its brim tilted just so. In one hand she carelessly holds palette and brushes. She glows with health and beauty. Rarely can an artist have painted their own likeness with such undisguised self-satisfaction.

The corridor that leads to modern art is lined with images of angst and alienation. Victor Emil Jansen’s memorably tubercular Self-Portrait at the Easel of 1829 sets the standard for many a later portrait of the artist as a hollow-cheeked young man, alone and palely loitering. Gustave Courbet falls backwards against a tree, wounded fatally to the heart. Edgar Degas sees himself as a reticent dandy in black. Cezanne stares at himself so hard that his great bald forehead seems to mutate into a shape almost mineral, crystalline in its multi-faceted complexity – apt symbol for the sense of epistemological doubt that courses through his art. Self-doubt rather than world-doubt furnishes the keynote of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Felt Hat, painted in a frenzy of short stabbed wheeling brushstrokes that whirl him into thin air. He looks like a man about to implode, like a dying star. James Abbot McNeill Whistler, by contrast, depicts himself fading into the shadows. Each picture tells a kind of truth about its subject. Van Gogh did indeed flare and die, while Whistler went into a long low-toned decline. Pictorial exaggeration does not necessarily involve emotional dishonesty.

The only real disappointment of this exhibition is its last section, devoted to the final half century or so. There are some intriguing small things here – a good Freud and a half-cooked piece of late Bacon – but nothing to stand comparison with what has come before. A Picasso or two would have helped, but apparently nothing lendable could be found. None the less, “Self-Portrait” does tell a more or less coherent story, amounting to a kind of collective autobiography of the Western artist since circa 1433 – someone who started out wanting to be accepted as a gentleman, but ended up desperately insisting that he was an Outsider. What comes through most forcefully of all, though, is just how hard it is to fathom the enigma of what should be known best of all. That sense of mystery is there, right from the start, in the little picture by Jan van Eyck of his own face surrounded on all sides by black. The darkness in which the painter chose to shroud his own likeness makes the very idea of self-awareness seem like a chimera. Now I see myself. Now I do not.