Podcast transcript
MAKING SELF PORTRAITS
Hello, and welcome to a podcast from Royal Collection Trust. Today's lecture at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is given by Lucy Peter, Assistant Curator of Paintings. In this lecture, Lucy talks about the art of creating a self-portrait. Other talks and lectures within our events programme can be found using our what's on guide on our website.
So hello, and welcome to The Queen's Gallery, for those of you who haven't been here before. So as Lexi said, I'm Lucy Peter and I'm Assistant Curator at Royal Collection Trust. Today, in this talk, I'm going to be looking really at how artists made self-portraits. Firstly, thinking about the production and availability of mirrors and what impact the invention of flat glass mirrors had on the development of self-portraiture in general. And then in the second half I'm going to be looking at how artists use mirrors to paint self-portraits and what unique challenges this presented them with.
So really to start with I just want to say that before the invention of photography artists had to use mirrors to produce self-portraits. Thus one of the fundamental, practical considerations with painted self-portraits, and easy to forget today, was the availability and the quality of the mirrors. The mirror, as we know it today, a flat glass surface with a metal coated back, was not invented until around 1500.
And before this, artists had to make do with what mirrors were available, which invariably would produce either a discoloured or a distorted reflection. While it's hard to quantify what level of impact the invention of the first flat glass mirror has had on artists, it's also long been suggested that the development of self-portraiture at the turn of the 16th century, is directly linked to this whole development of larger, clearer mirrors at around the same date. So this is the question I'm going to come back to bit later.
And then on the right here, this is again from the British Museum, it's a detail here taken from a classical Greek vase and you can see again this polished metal mirror hanging on the wall on the right. Remarkably, you could get quite a clear image from a polished metal mirror, but the downside is that you had to polish it before each use. this was normally done with an animal skin.
Historically we also know that mirrors have always been regarded as very prized possessions, so this is something that persisted into the 18th century. The ancient Roman philosopher, Seneca, who was a tutor, and later advisor to Emperor Nero, recorded that for a single one of those mirrors, chiselled silver or gold, woman are capable of spending amount equal to the dowry the state once offered to poor general's daughters. So they were hugely, hugely costly.
Another popular form of mirror was this, which is called an obsidian mirror. So it's an igneous rock and again I was so shocked at the clarity of the image which you can see on the right. Again this is in the British Museum. This is an Aztec mirror, but you can see this is a reflection of a light box with a comb on it, and it's completely brilliant really.
Metal mirrors continue to be used throughout the Medieval period and I found this, which is a detail taken from The Luttrell Psalter and we can see here that the woman on the right, the maidservant in blue, is assisting the lady on the left in platting her hair and you can see that she's holding what would have been a metal mirror.
So the first great advancement in mirror making came in the 14th century, when the glass makers of Nuremburg, which became the centre for glass making, developed a form of mirror made from a glass bubble. A glass ball was blown and injected with molten lead or tin. I've put this up, this is an 18th century print but it shows the kind of mirror making, the glass making processes.
So here we've got – this is a man blowing a glass ball through a tube. Once cool, once this ball had been injected with lead, smaller pieces could be cut off to create small, hand held, convex mirrors. But the problem with convex mirrors is that although the image was very clear, it was also distorted, as we know, with convex mirrors, so things closer to the mirror appear enlarged, and things further away appear much smaller.
This illustration is taken from what was known as the book of trades. It was published in Frankfurt in 1568, and it essentially shows various professions that were took place in Nuremberg at that time and its things like the copper smith, the clock maker, the baker and it had a sort of little poem underneath each of these illustrations and this one shows Der Spiegler, or the Mirror Maker.
And what's so fascinating about this print is that all the glasses here, all these mirrors, are convex and you can see the smaller ones here, which would have been quite affordable, and the larger ones here. But what you'll notice about the larger ones is that they've got this very uneven surface and this was an effect of blowing a glass bubble and that you couldn’t always create this very even surface.
So very famous painting, but from the early 15th century, convex mirrors start appearing in paintings, particularly those produced in Germany and Flanders, where mirror making was really flourishing at this date. So perhaps the most famous convex mirror of all is represented in the Jan van Eyck's the Arnolfini Portrait, which you're all familiar with, and it's at the National Gallery.
So it was painted while van Eyck was living in the Flemish city of Bruges, and we can see that the entire room here is reflected in a convex mirror which is hanging on the back wall. It's been suggested that the figure in red is van Eyck himself, also supported by the fact that on the wall in the back of the painting we can see Jan van Eyck's signature roughly translated as Jan van Eyck was here 1434.
Interestingly, I also read that the mirror itself is much larger than a mirror could have actually been made at this time. So van Eyck is actually using a bit of artistic licence here. But the reflection itself is very accurate.
Just drawing it back to our exhibition, I just wanted to put this in. So, this is one of the paintings that you'll be able to see in the final room. It's by Roestraten and it's a Vanitas, but these orbs, which you see here, this is a glass orb, were made using exactly the same process that complex mirrors were produced using.
So it was a glass ball and it was filled with a lead sort of composite. I've got a detail here. This painting was one of the paintings that received full treatment for the exhibition so it went into conservation, and it had a slight darkened yellow varnish on it and when the varnish was removed it exposed this fantastic reflection. I don’t know if you can see it on this slide but you've got the artist here, the easel and then a window and a sort of row of paintings here and then the Vanitas scene in the foreground.
While reading and researching for this exhibition this image came up more than any other in this history of self-portraiture, so it's an illustration taken from a French translation of Boccaccio's Concerning Famous Women, and it's the earliest known image of an artist producing a self-portrait using a mirror. so in his text Boccaccio records a story first recorded by Pliny the Elder, of Iaia of Cyzicus, who had apparently painted a portrait of herself, executed with the aid of a mirror. In Boccaccio's version of this the figure of Iaia has been replaced by the figure of Marcia. But what we see here is that the mirror in question, you might not be able to see it because it's not hugely enlarged here but it's actually a convex mirror, but what this tells us is that artists before 1500 were able to produce self-portraits but they had to correct the distortions produced by the convex mirror, which is what we can see is happening here.
Really lovely, and in contrast to this, Parmigianino, in this remarkable self portrait of around 1524, makes no attempt to correct the distortions of the convex mirror from which he was working. And we know from Versari that he was working from a convex mirror and Versari records that it's a barber's mirror, or the type of mirror used by a barber.
And what Parmigianino does here is he not only recreates the visual effect of the convex mirror, but he actually paints this onto a bespoke, carved wooden panel that was actually convex in shape. So the whole impression that you're giving is that you're not looking into a painting; you are looking at the artist reflected in a convex mirror.
This was actually a show piece, so Parmigianino produced this to try and get new commissions when he arrived in Rome. So profound, in fact, was the impact of Parmigianino's self-portrait, that even after convex mirrors were replaced by flat mirrors, artists continued to allude, and still do today really, to the convex mirror as a mark of respect for Parmigianino and his skill and inventiveness.
Going onto flat mirrors, so very little improvement was made to mirror making during the Middle Ages, and it was not until around 1500 that two major breakthroughs happened. They both happened in Venice, which was the city that would become the dominating force in mirror making for the next 200 years.
The first was a process of producing flat glass, that was not only flat, but it was crystal clear. so mirrors and glass up until this point had been slightly coloured or sort of slightly oddly shaded, but the salinity of the water in the Veneto sort of meant that they could produce this very clear glass, which they called Cristallo, and the second was a new silvering technique for coating the backs of the mirrors, which could produce a more even surface. The result was a mirror, which produced the earliest objective view of the human form, undistorted by either colour, deformations in the glass, or poor quality.
The real revelations, so there's these two things that happen in Venice, but the real revelation was this flat glass, and I just wanted to mention that this isn't the first time that flat glass existed. There was another process for making flat glass, which was called crowning, and you'll know this from pubs and old buildings, so a ball of glass would be blown, in the same way it would for a convex mirror, but then it would be rotated in front of a furnace and spun, I've got another image here.
And in a process which was called crowning and then large pieces would be taken out to produce windows for the wealthy and then they would produce using the centre, which was called the bullseye, because you can see where the punty stick, which is the stick that you use for spinning, has been removed, and these were used to make much cheaper windows.
The Venetian process was known as the broad process, so this was this really new process. Again, the blow pipe was charged with molten glass and blown to form a bubble and then this was formed into a sausage shape, and I found this amazing print and it's much later, this is 19th century, but essentially what would happen is that the ball would be flung to form a cylinder and so you can see here these flinging pits. The cylinders were called cannons and this is showing flinging the cannons, and this print shows that to create larger cylinders they actually dug these pits so that they could fling the cannons further. So once they've been flung, they were cut along the long axis, flattened out and then this could be used to create a mirror.
This process adopted by the Venetians mean that flat glass mirrors could be produced measuring up to 80 cm. So for 200 years, mirrors could only measure up to 80 cm. As I mentioned earlier, traditionally art historians have drawn this link between the production of flat glass mirrors in around 1500, and the increased production of self-portraits, which happened at about this time, the argument being that artists, who could now see their own reflection clearly, and undistorted, therefore produced more self-portraits. there's a counter argument to this, so James Hall wrote a fantastic book on self-portraiture, in which he argued against this whole idea, based primarily on the fact that although flat glass mirrors were available, they were also prohibitively expensive until around 1700.
We know from paintings such as this one that flat glass mirrors certainly existed in the 16th century, and that some artists had some access to them. So here I've picked up this fantastic painting by Titian, in which we see Venus with a mirror and we can see here that this is a mirror, a flat glass mirror, produced using the sort of Venetian technique.
However, Titian was working in Venice, the centre of mirror making, so that might have had an impact on his ability to access mirrors. It's actually incredibly hard, as I've found through my research, to try and work out exactly how much a glass mirror would have cost the average Joe. You can find out a lot about how much mirrors might have cost an Earl, a Duke or a King, but these values are quite distorted because you don’t know how much value is attributed to the glass and how much is attributed to the very splendid frames that they tended to come in.
However, there is certainly some evidence to suggest that they were proportionally more expensive than anyone might think, so I've found an inventory, it's the Earl of Leicester's inventory of 1588, which lists three great glasses, one standing on a very fair frame, with bears and ragged staves on the top, with steel glass in it, and the other two of crystal, total value 40 pounds.
And by comparison, in the same inventory, two life-sized, full-length portraits of Leicester, one by the artist Federico Zuccaro, so well-known artist, and one by the Anglo-Netherland – an Anglo-Netherlandish artist were jointly valued at 4 pounds. So we can tell, despite the fact that we are talking about the Earl of Leicester, but we can tell that proportionally mirrors were valued incredibly highly in the 16th century.
And by the 17th century, mirrors of a regular size were more readily available to the middling classes. This is painted and this is Rubens, and you can see that Rubens is looking back to Titian and Veronese, who also painted the same subject matter. But this is Rubens Venus in front of a Mirror, and this was painted 20 years before Rubens painted his self-portrait, which you can see in the exhibition.
Presumably Rubens would have had access, as a rather wealthy artist, to this kind of mirror. Dutch genre paintings, so they also provide evidence of artists owning mirrors in the mid- 17th century. On the left one of the most beautiful paintings in the Royal Collection. This is the Music Lesson or Lady at the Virginals, and we can see here that Vermeer would have owned a mirror, a mirror of a very decent size, we're talking of the 80cm max kind of group.
And on the right I wanted to put this, which is the 17th century Flemish mirror, Dutch mirror, just to show that often mirrors at this point were made with ebony frames, because ebony was being imported in large numbers into the Dutch Republic.
Very briefly I just wanted to talk about this, which is the final stage in the production of mirrors, which came in 1688, so very late in France a man called Bernard Perot invented a method for casting glass, which was here. On the right you can see molten glass is poured onto a slab and the slab had sides the exact thickness of the glass.
Like the Venetians, who guarded their system of mirror-making, throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, I love the fact that for a long time the French then guarded their secret for casting glass from the Venetians, so it was a sort of tit for tat going on. Also while it's tempting to think that the hall of mirrors at Versailles was this first big bold statement of the French's ability to produce huge panes of glass, in fact this was produced, and this was built, before Perot's invention. So there are 357 small panes of glass, all produced using the Venetian method, so the flinging of the cannons, which is absolutely remarkable, and there are 21 individual panes here in each of these archways. For self-portraiture, Perot's invention meant that artists could, for the very first time, produce full length self-portraits. So you'll notice really, in the history of self-portraiture, this isn't a format that comes up before around 1700, and this is a wonderful self-portrait by Goya.
Essentially, although it is unlikely that the development of flat glass mirrors in around 1500 had a dramatic practical effect on artists ability to produce self-portraits, I think the ability to see oneself more clearly and completely and undistorted really for the first time, at the turn of the 16th century, and probably however infrequently, it must have had a profound social impact, encouraging greater self-awareness, and really fuelling the vanity of these renaissance self-portraitists.
So now, having really looked at the development of mirrors, and what impact the availability of mirrors had on the size and quality of self-portraits, I'd like to now really think about how artists use mirrors to make self-portraits. For anyone who's attempted to produce a self- portrait, even using a modern mirror, it's not as easy as one might expect. There are lots of things you have to think about, and there are lots of challenges you'll find that you come up against.
So really perhaps the simplest method for producing a self-portrait is to create a drawn self- portrait. when working on a flat table or using a drawing board, the artist can position their mirror directly in front of them. This creates this very frontal pose, so this is 20th century, this is a photographer, Bresson, and he's drawing a self-portrait and he's placed his mirror on the window, but he's placed it at eye height, and the resulting self-portrait you can see. this is one of the self-portraits in the exhibition. It's by William Strang and you can see that he's using the same kind of approach to produce his self-portrait.
This basic method was used from the 16th century and continues to be used by artists today. so on the left this is Agostino Carracci. Agostino Carracci set up a drawing school in Bologna with his brother, Annibale and his cousin Lodovico, and life drawing was really central to this training school in Bologna and you can see here, from a very early age, this is something that Agostino was practicing himself.
A lot of the drawn self-portraits you'll see in the exhibition, and particularly towards the beginning, show artists at a very young age. Our theory really is that this is because they were so young, and starting out in their careers they couldn't afford, or didn't have the gumption, to employ a model of their own, so they often looked at their own faces, cos it's the easiest form of model. And I just wanted to put this in.
This is Lucian Freud, as you all know. this was presented to the queen. It's one of the latest works in the exhibition and it was presented as part of the Order of Merit series, an order to which Lucian Freud himself was appointed in 1993. So problems really start to occur when you try and paint a self-portrait. For painting self-portraits, use of an easel meant repositioning the mirror so that it could be seen.
Jean Alphonse Roehn here, we can see on the right, shows a portrait of an artist painting herself portrait. It's incredibly useful for us, as art historians, to see what's going on, so we've got the artist here, with her easel, she's propped up a mirror on the left-hand side on this chair, at right angles to the easel.
She's next to a window, so the bottom of the window has been blocked off so that light falls from the top, and this has traditionally been thought to be the most flattering form of light, so you often see this, in the studios of portraitists. the other thing is that she's positioned herself with her mirror on her left, so that her painting arm neither casts a shadow on her canvas, or blocks her body.
This practical set up for painting a self-portrait, resulted in one of the most common place poses in self-portraiture, essentially the artist turning normally over their right shoulder, half their face cast in shadow, fixes the viewer with a penetrating stare. So I've put this here. This is Samuel Cooper, and again you can see this in the exhibition. What’s interesting is Samuel Cooper appears to really have exploited this, to create the sense of animation. So we get the sense that we've interrupted him, he's turning to look at us, and his lips are slightly parted, as if he's sort of about to speak.
The right angle set up, as I'm going to call it, appears to have emerged almost simultaneously in Venice, in Florence, in the 16th century. Many self-portraits at this date show this strong sense of the right angle set up. So this is a double-sided drawing by Pontormo, on the recto, on the left, we can see a portrait of a man, and then on the verso we've got these two monks. And the monks have now been linked directly to another painting by Pontormo, The Supper of Emmaus, which is at the Uffizi, of around 1525. But the fact that this man doesn't appear in any of Pontormo's other works suggest that it's not a study and it's a self-portrait. Also supported by the fact that what he appears to be doing is this, his left hand is his painting hand, and he's pointing at himself in the mirror.
Alessandro Allori, in this self-portrait, this is actually credited, not only as the first self- portrait in which an artist shows himself with the tools of his trade, but also the first to reference this right angle set up quite explicitly. So the artist we see here has got his palette and his brush and he's looking out at us. We are in the position of the mirror. I should say that this isn't the actual self-portrait.
This is one of the 224 miniature copies produced by Giuseppe Macpherson, which again you can see in the exhibition, after the self-portraits in the Uffizi Gallery. So the collection of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. While Allori is credited as the first artist to reference this set up in his self-portrait, the relatively unknown artist, Johann Gump, was the first to really expose the exact workings of this set up. So in the same way that we saw Jean Alphonse Roehn earlier doing it, this is the first time an artist really showed it. We see here we've got Johann Gump physically in the space, we've got this image of him in a mirror and then we've got his painted self-portrait on the canvas.
This right angle set up continued to be used by artists throughout the 18th and into the 19th century because it was the most practical method of producing a self-portrait. On the left I've put this is Anton Graff, who was a Swiss artist, and we can see he's turning over his right shoulder, so would have been turning over his left shoulder to look in the mirror.
And then Emma Richards, who is doing the opposite. She is looking over what would have been her painting arm, her right arm, or her right shoulder and I thought I've just put this in because she's very cleverly just admitted the angle of her painting arm and sort of tucked it away and then included this palette.
By the 17th century the general advancement in optics, and a greater availability of mirrors, provided artists with new opportunities to experiment and be more ambitious in their self- portraits. I could talk about this painting forever, because it is ground breaking in so many ways. This is Artemisia Gentileschi self-portrait as the allegory of painting.
Essentially it's ground breaking firstly because she's showing herself at work, but very physically at work. Something that women at this date really didn't do. And secondly because she's showing herself as the female personification of painting and to understand this we need to understand there was a book at the time written by a man called Cesare Ripa, and it's called the Iconologia.
And it was an emblem book. It was used by artists at the time and essentially it was a book listing abstract concepts alphabetically, so anything from justice to plenty to arrogance, and alongside those those concepts, it would show a picture of a female person and it would describe the attributes that that female person should have. Arrogance is apparently a lady in green with ass’s ears, holding a peacock under her left arm.
Artists could then use that and they could insert these images of women with these attributes into their paintings, knowing that people had an understanding of the emblem book and would therefore know immediately that the peacock lady was arrogance. And Artemisia Gentileschi here shows herself exactly as Cesare Ripa describes painting.
So it's female figure with dishevelled black hair, a mask of imitation hanging around her neck and she's wearing changeable iridescent drapery, something that Artemisia Gentileschi has shown, through a fabric that was available at the time, which had a different coloured warp and weft thread.
So it had – one was purple, one was green and it created this sense of iridescence. And notably she's not included the gagged mouth, symbolising that painting is a dumb form of poetry. Because we think that in a self-portrait it would have had nasty connotations of sort of suppression of female speech, these sorts of things.
But thirdly I want to say that it's ground breaking in the composition. It's an incredibly complicated thing to paint. I wanted to put this in. This is her father, Orazio Gentileschi, and this is painted probably 20 years before Artemisia produced her self-portrait. But it shows the sort of mirror that Artemisia Gentileschi might have been – had access to.
To date it's most commonly been suggested that Artemisia Gentileschi used two mirrors to paint her face and then painted in the rest of her body later. One of my colleagues in the conservation studio encouraged me to experiment and try and work out whether Artemisia Gentileschi could have produced the whole self-portrait using two mirrors. And what we discovered is that if you put two mirrors at a 45-degree angle, you can essentially see what Artemisia Gentileschi was painting. And so here you've got the reflection in the white mirror of what is in the brown mirror over here.
I wanted to put this to just show that actually it's possible that Artemisia Gentileschi could have blocked in the curve of her arm, and her features, without having to get an assistant in and to model for the body. So while for practical reasons the outward gaze remained the fundamental organisational principle for self-portraits, a number of artists experimented with the slightly trickier conceits of averting their gaze or trickier still, painting themselves in profile. So this is our Albrecht Durer. This is one of his first self-portraits.
He's 13, and here he is precociously showing himself with his gaze averted. We think he produced this using the right angled set up, but then just changing the direction of his eyes and cleverly putting his hand in here, pointing outside the picture frame. So thus suggesting it's an objective likeness.
On the right we've got Jean Etienne Liotard. As I said, this is the only profile self-portrait in the exhibition. Incredibly difficult. I tried this again – I tried this with my dad at home with mirrors and I think we worked out you have to use three, at least, to get a profile of yourself. Liotard produced 17 self-portraits in his lifetime, and this is the only one he did in profile, which I think is a testament to the difficulty of this genre. And I wanted to put this in because despite the difficulties this is the first known self-portrait in western art history.
This is Leon Battista Alberti, and we can see here that he is producing a self-portrait as a cameo. So trickier still than this, even profile self-portraits, was a sculptured self-portrait. Primarily because you had to show the back of your own head, and without without the aid of photography this was incredibly difficult. this is also attested to by the contents of the Royal Collection.
So we have very few sculpted self-portraits, and this is the only one in the exhibition and it's produced by Sarah Bernhardt, but it was produced in the 19th century, so presumably she would have been aided by photography at this stage.
There are, however, a few absolutely remarkable exceptions to this rule. so this is wonderful. This is by Schardt. He's this is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on public display, if you want to go and see it. And this is one of the earliest known sculpted self-portraits. He was born in the Netherlands and toured around Europe, painting these terracotta portraits of fellow townsmen. But it's absolutely remarkable because we just don't know how he produced this. He would have had to have had many mirrors and possibly the help of assistants.
And one final exception to this rule is Messerschmitt. So he produced this incredibly odd collection of grimacing self-portrait heads. Art historians are undecided as to why he produced them and also which ones are the self-portraits and which ones aren't. The one on the left has been firmly attributed as a self-portrait, and also this character, who art historians call the strong man, is also thought to be a self-portrait of Messerschmitt. But he produced 69 of these in total, all of which were found at his death in his studio.
And finally I just want to say that – so despite the advances of mirror technology, some poses still remained completely out of reach to artists until the invention of photography, and one in particular is the artist with his eyes closed. So on the left, this is by Watts. It was produced shortly before his death and we know that he used a photograph to produce this self-portrait with his eyes closed.
And in 1997 I thought this was interesting. This is Gavin Turk, again doing the same conceit, aptly called Something that I'll Never Really See. so using mirrors not only set a number of limitations, for the self-portrait, but also presented a number of unique challenges.
One of the most fundamental truths about using a mirror to produce a self-portrait, is that the artist's subject will inevitably appear in reverse in the final self-portrait. So what we're really looking at when we look at a self-portrait, is what the artist looked like to himself in a mirror, not what he looked like to other people.
And the subtle differences between an artist’s real and his painted likeness, are often only noticeable when we compare a self-portrait with a correctly orientated portrait. Either a portrait done by someone else, or a photograph. So here we've got Jacques Louis David. This is a self-portrait of 1794.
And Louis David, he suffered from a facial tumour for most of his adult life, and we can see here, on the right, it appears just under his right eye, and then this bust by Rude shows it under his left.
Comparison between Landseer's self portrait of around 1865 and a photograph taken almost the same date not only shows that Landseer flattered himself, , but also shows that he probably used the photograph as a guide and for blocking in his body. However, the fact that his parting appears here in this self-portrait on the left, and in the photograph on the right, would suggest he used a mirror, at least to paint his face.
While researching for the exhibition I really started to wonder how important this reversal really is and how we understand what an artist looked like. And in short I think I concluded not very much. Apart from I read something about this thing and it's called the hair part theory and the theory goes that if you have your hair parted over your right eye it's more feminine, and if you have your hair parted over your left eye it's more masculine.
And that there are certain cases where politicians have famously changed their hair part and become more successful because of it. And most famously Clark Kent here, so this is Christopher Reeve as Clark Kent, has a right-hand parting as Clark Kent, and then ta da, as Superman his hair part changes to the left.
So I'm not trying to suggest therefore that it's hugely important that we think about self- portraits as mirror reflections, but actually there might be these sort of very subtle differences in how we understand an artist's character.
Such a comparison also often reveals the artist made some attempt correct the reversing effects of the mirror. So on the left we've got Hogarth, 1745, with a scar above his right eye, and a print, supervised by Hogarth on the right here, showing – we can see here that he's repositioned the side of his scar on his engraving plate so that it appears in – above his right eye, so in the correct position, in both is painted and his printed likeness.
And just in contrast to this, Van Gogh makes no attempt here to correct the reversing effects of the mirror. So we famously know that he cut off his left ear and – but here he's showing himself in his self-portrait with a very obviously bandaged right ear.
Another challenge faced by artists when painting a self-portrait is that the painting hand would be moving during this process. Many artists got around this by simply omitting the lower half of their body altogether, or they would tuck their painting hand out of sight.
So here we've got Reynolds very subtly positioning his painting hand, so his left hand here, which would have been his right hand, out of sight, and Rembrandt doing something very similar in his self-portrait. It's also been suggested that in some instances, artists would only put hands in towards the ends of their careers, when they had more confidence and had more experience.
So here we have Kneller at 39 and Kneller at 60 and you can see here that he's gradually adding in more of his body and more importantly his hand. Also where the identity of a sitter is unknown it's possible to infer that the subject is a self-portrait through studying the treatment of the painting hand.
And so whether this painting, which you can see in the exhibition, was produced in northern Italy, but whether it's a portrait or a self-portrait has been debated. However, this is an X-ray which we took during the conservation of this work, and the elephant in the room is that yes, there is an upside-down portrait of a woman underneath this portrait.
But also you can see you can see her this is a detail of the artist's hand and you can see that he struggles with his painting hand and therefore suggesting that it might be more likely to be a self-portrait, because he took more than one attempt to do this painting hand.
A sort of further problem faced by artists is if they wanted to show themselves at work, a right-handed artist would always appear left-handed. Between 1600 and 1850 artists didn't like this. They wanted to be shown right-handed if they were right-handed. And the easiest way to solve this is to paint your painting arms as they appear in the mirror and then just swap the position of your hands at the very last minute.
Some artists did this very successfully, so we've got Rolinda Sharples here. So this would have been her non-painting hand holding her easel. And she's just literally put in this hand here as her painting hand and then popped in the easel, popped in the palette here in her – what was her painting hand. And this feels rather unfair but this is attributed to Orazio Borgianni, and we can see here that he's done this rather unsuccessfully. So this is his non-painting hand, his palette would have been here, and he's popped in this sort of rather daft hand , sort of barely making it into the edge of his canvas. #
And Paul Brill here. this is a lovely example of an artist thinking outside the box. So here we've got the natural position here of this would have been his painting hand, pointing up towards his canvas, and this would have been his hand holding his palette and he's just set him palette against the canvas and then filled this gap with a lute. So he's sort of thought creatively. so this is Rembrandt’s famous self-portrait with two circles, at Kenwood House. The X-ray actually of this reveals that he originally put all of his tools in his other hand and then corrected it in the final painting.
By 1860 the desire to normalise the painting hand had completely disappeared. So this is just sort of showing you that by this point, particularly with the emergence of impressionism and the desire to record things accurately as you saw them meant that artists were happy to present themselves left handed if they were right handed.
It's a kind of whistle stop tour of how you make a self-portrait but I wanted to end with just sort of saying that perhaps the most fascinating, i'm going to call it a by-product of artists having used mirrors to produce self-portraits, for over four hundred years, so that's before the advent of photography, is the artists very distinctive penetrating outward stare, a result of the artist looking and scrutinising their own features in the mirror.
In fact so synonymous is this penetrating gaze with the art of self-portraiture that the two are almost inextricably linked today. so portraits of unknown people who exhibit a penetrating outward stare, will often be identified incorrectly as self-portraits just purely on this basis. So this portrait of an unknown man was ascribed as and presented to George III as a self-portrait of Raphael, based, and we know this from evidence, based a lot on the fact that he has this outward gaze because they thought he was looking at himself in a mirror.
And also this is something that we know that artists were aware of, and exploited. they sort of maximised on this fact that they had this penetrating stare. so Mytens like a number of artists, emphasise the power of his gaze by placing the power of his gaze by placing the nearest to us at the very centre of his composition, so this creates this even more penetrating gaze, and there are a number of self-portraits in the exhibition where you can see this happening.
Just to finish, while the eyes of a portrait might follow you around the room, the eyes of the artists scrutinising their own reflection in a mirror, appear to penetrate into our very soul. It is this striking sense, when looking at a self-portrait, that we are gaining an insight into the very psyche of the artist and of course this is all thanks to the mirror, that is perhaps the defining feature that makes so – self-portraiture so universally compelling.