Three and a half millennia of self-portraits

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David Ecclestone gets ‘hooked’ on this ‘graceful, sure-footed exposition, both authoritative and entertaining, of a long thread in cultural history’

The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History by James Hall

Three and a half millennia in 288 pages.  Not possible you might think.  And yet James Hall brings it off and manages to make it immensely entertaining.  The same problems of concision and selection inevitably face the reviewer of this book.  Rather than gloss over the whole narrative, it is much more entertaining to look closely at the bits that engage you – much as does the author.

With such a broad historical sweep – from ancient Egypt to Tracey Emin and beyond – there could be little room for focus, but the author engages just such a debate early on:  the ‘mirror myth’.  He challenges the view that there was a ‘perfect cultural storm’ that blew in around 1500, with the emergence at that time of crystal glass mirrors of high quality and the cult of individuality among artists, thus providing the means and the will for self-portraiture.  It was, in fact, in the Middle Ages that the mirror exercised extraordinary symbolic significance and became a cultural metaphor, casting light on personal and interpersonal knowledge.

Having given the Middle Ages their due in dismissing the mirror myth, the book tracks back a little in the Renaissance to look closely at the cult of the individual artist.  The big re-evaluation of the self-portrait received its impetus in 15th-century Florence at the hands of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). He presented himself as a self-constructed charismatic personality, rather than an artisan tradesman.  Such an individual asserted social status by affecting a disdain for money.  Here the self-portrait (uncommissioned and unprescriptive) fitted perfectly.   

Pushing these ideas just a little further, there emerged towards the end of the 15th century the concept of the artist as hero, bringing us to an examination of the work of  that most famous, prolific and indulgent self-portraitist, Albrecht Durer (1471–1528),  the extent and intimacy of whose self-examination was so tellingly revealed in the recent Courtauld show.  In his 1500 oil self-portrait, the hand gesture both points to the artist’s beauty and sensuality and at the same time offers it to the viewer: the artist’s gift of himself to an adoring public.

In moving to the 17th century, the account records visits to the artists’ studios, which had become an important marker for the rich and cultivated.  This was accompanied by a proliferation of self-portraits of the artist at work.  Hall introduces this genre with the stunning work by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656), Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting (c. 1638–9).  Probably painted for Charles I, it vividly expresses the sheer physicality of the act of painting through the tension and force in the body of a very sexy young woman (an extremely courageous characterization given that she had herself apparently once been raped) clothed in a very revealing green dress dramatically painted with its textures and reflections vividly depicted.  The success of the painting lies largely in the unusually high viewpoint, almost directly above the artist’s left shoulder.  This achieves two things.  It accentuates Artemisia’s cleavage, adding sexual potency, and it produces a great compositional arc across the canvas, from her left arm, holding palette and brushes and leaning for support on a table, through her left shoulder and into the outstretched right arm that transmits this tension to the brush on the canvas.  As a calling-card demonstrating the artist’s talent and command of her craft in a male-dominated environment it could hardly be more effective.

The 19th century takes us into substantial considerations of sculpture and ceramics as media for self-portraits, and in the sphere of painting focuses on two prolific painters of themselves: Gustave Courbet (1819–77), who used the medium to construct his own solipsistic pantheon (carefully devised never to reveal his physical deterioration); and Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), who painted  himself to avoid having to pay models.

Sadly Courbet’s monumental work (with its equally monumental title) The Painter’s Studio, A Real Allegory Defining Seven Years of my Artistic and Moral Life (c. 1854-5) was little appreciated.  Having been rejected for the Universal Exhibition of 1855 in Paris, it was showcased by Courbet himself in a tent erected opposite the Palais des Beaux Arts.  After its cool reception, it was rolled up and later auctioned.  It served as a backdrop in a theatre for 20 years before being rescued by the Louvre in 1920.  At the other end of the hubristic scale are the double portraits by Vincent van Gogh of the chairs occupied by himself and by Paul Gauguin that Hall links back to the Renaissance pendant portraits of married couples, with the man occupying the right side as does Vincent’s chair here.

This is a graceful, sure-footed exposition, both authoritative and entertaining, of a long thread in cultural history.  While eminently readable as a continuous narrative, it is equally a book to be dipped into. Perhaps it is the reviewer’s prerogative to engage where he will with the writing.  My preliminary rifling through brought me up sharply with the Gentileschi self-portrait. And I was hooked.

The Self-Portrait: A Cultural History  by James Hall is published by Thames and Hudson. 288pp. £19.95 ISBN 978-0500239100