Self-Portrait

About Self-Portrait

Self-portraits let artists show their skill, claim status and study the one sitter always available. Catharina van Hemessen's small Self-Portrait (1548) is often cited as the earliest surviving image of a painter, man or woman, working at an easel. Judith Leyster turned from her canvas with an easy smile around 1630, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (1782) borrowed from Peter Paul Rubens to present herself as both fashionable and accomplished.

Other artists used the mirror for long self-scrutiny. Käthe Kollwitz drew and etched her own face for half a century, recording grief and age. The camera opened new routes: Lucas Samaras pushed and smeared the emulsion of Polaroid self-portraits in his Photo-Transformations (1973–76), and LaToya Ruby Frazier photographed herself with her mother in their Pennsylvania steel town for The Notion of Family (2014). Look for the mirror's reversal and a direct gaze.