The picture is a glowing self-appraisal, but like so many of Van Dyck’s portraits that smooth away the flaws and bestow ineffable glamour on the English court, the artist cannot seem to stop himself from undermining the perfection with contradictory details. What tells against all this glory is the tendril of damp hair clinging to Van Dyck’s slightly clammy brow; the artist would be dead at forty-two, it was said, of overwork.
Self-Portrait with Sunflower is a public performance, a star turn. It implies and requires an audience. The triangulation within it projects directly outwards too: Van Dyck looks at us, we look at the sun-king, who in turn gazes upon his favoured painter. It is a picture that calls for applause.
But it is not congenial; it is not, so to speak, on our side. Even the most out-turned of self-portraits, those that invite a two-way encounter, or where the artist is explicitly appearing by popular demand, are not necessarily sociable. Some artists want to appear in public, and tell you so in their self-portraits, others have been forced to do it and show it in defensive recoil.
Compare two paintings made a few years apart. We know precisely why Nicolas Poussin portrayed himself for his motives are laid out in an irritable letter; about the origins of Judith Leyster’s self-portrait we know nothing except what the painting reveals. In fact, so little is known about Leyster that for centuries her paintings were attributed to Frans Hals, whose fame obscured her reputation quite literally in the case of a picture that was found to have her monogram (JL entwined with a star, punning on her surname, which means lodestar) hidden beneath his forged signature. Leyster’s existence might eventually have been forgotten but for this buoyant picture.
Self-Portrait with Sunflower, c. 1633 Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641)
Intimacy is its trick: she was just working in her studio when you walked in, whereupon she pulled up a seat for you too. Cropped like an informal photo, just below the waist and so tight that one elbow and part of the collar do not make it into the frame, she leans casually back with a conversational smile, off duty for a sociable moment.
Leyster smiles, the work-in-progress implies, because she is the kind of artist who paints merry fiddlers, and perhaps because she is fond a joke. She is not trying to downplay her art, in which she takes evident pride, so much as play up its levity. The neat positioning of the two heads, inclined in different directions but both looking at you, embraces you in the mutual warmth of the circle. Like Walt Disney side by side with his animated Mickey, Leyster gestures lightly at the fiddler with the tip of her brush inviting you too to smile at the antics of the little fellow sawing away with his bow. You could not have a warmer welcome.
Poussin, by contrast, distances himself from the task. He sits back from the picture plane, enclosed by his own paintings – the three behind him, the one before him – in an attitude of fastidious withdrawal. He has only agreed to paint a likeness of himself because nobody else in Rome is up to the task, and only to satisfy a friend. ‘I should not have undertaken anything like this for any other living man,’ he informed his old friend Paul Chantelou, who hardly needed to be told since he had years of difficulty persuading him to paint the picture in the first place.
Self-Portrait, c. 1630 Judith Leyster (1609–60)
Poussin is sequestered in gloom, black hair, black cloth draped over his shoulder like funeral weeds swathing a coffin, black diamond glittering in his ring. His shadow falls ominously across the Latin inscription on the canvas behind him: an effigy of Nicolas Poussin from Les Andelys at the age of 56 in the year of the Roman Jubilee in 1650. It reads like an epitaph, proclaiming his affiliation with classical Rome in an austere third person as if someone else was speaking. The painting is resonant with solemn music.
Yet it is not the mood, or even the strange composition of the picture with its quadratic forms and its mysterious air of deliberation and finality, that strikes some commentators so much as the trail of visual ‘clues’ waiting to be deciphered. His toga: a Masonic robe? The four-sided pyramid of his diamond: an emblem of Freemasonry, or a symbol of Stoicism (constant as a rock)? The eye on the diadem worn by the woman in the canvas behind him: the Eye of All-Seeing Vigilance that represents the Supreme Being to Freemasons? Why, the picture was practically painted for Dan Brown to decode.
That this woman represents friendship or art, as prescribed in iconographic dictionaries of the period, seems a good deal more feasible and makes sense given that the picture was a gift for a friend. But the character of the picture would hardly be altered even if she turned out to be All-Seeing Vigilance; it is her positioning in the composition – as much deliberated as every other element – that matters. She looks the other way from Poussin, her animation balanced by his absolute composure, just as his hand rests motionless upon the book while the golden frames of the paintings shoot back and forth like trains rushing in different directions behind the stationed gravity of his head.
Self-Portrait, c. 1650 Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
For Poussin these paintings, whatever they show, are his life. By the time he finished this self-portrait in his mid-fifties he had a reputation across Europe as one of the most intellectual and disciplined of masters. He had left France more than twenty years before, despising French painters as strapazzoni, glib hacks who ‘make a sport of turning out a picture in 24 hours’. Truth could only be distilled from intense and protracted cogitation. Compositions had to be tested over and again in advance, rehearsed with wax forms in a toy theatre. Even the most violent action in his work is marked by stasis and meditation. His paintings require you to stop and think, learn, mark and inwardly digest their mysterious dramas, and so it is with this self-portrait – a summation of his art as well as himself, neither offering instant disclosure.
These paintings spread like a hand of cards behind him – an allegory, a blank canvas, the back of a canvas – are all easel pictures. Being an artist in Rome at that time still meant producing frescos, panel-paintings and altarpieces to order, their subject matter generally dictated by the patron. But for Poussin it meant only one thing, easel paintings on landscape-shaped canvases, stretched, framed and painted exactly like the ones in this picture. His landscape-narratives, moreover, and his great religious paintings were never some compromise with a patron. Poussin, considered to have had a stern and melancholy temperament, prone to irritation and loathing constraint, avoided all the usual professional conventions to the point of bypassing the market altogether. He worked only for patrons who had become friends. That he sits in a booth of his own paintings feels majestically apt for an artist whose sense of freedom depended on making art for himself. He would not have painted himself ‘for any other living man’ and he never painted any other living person.
The public reputation encloses the painter, and the painter’s passionate sense of vocation dominates the picture, a passion that has its ultimate testimony in his face. Poussin appears worn out, hypertense, his eyes red-rimmed with the effort of achieving such a high degree of probity. And yet the expression pulls in another direction too, from this fierce look of honour and discipline to something that looks surprisingly like sorrow. It is often said that Poussin was two different artists, that the younger Poussin was a proto-romantic whose pictures were charged with all sorts of conflicting and dangerous emotions, a man who could draw himself tousled and scowling in the early years in Rome, the kind of man who could be arrested during a street brawl like Caravaggio. This artist cools and contracts into the later Poussin, strict classicist and mythologizer whose paintings are above easy pleasures. Perhaps Poussin has moved from intensity to profundity, but something of the younger man’s strength of emotion is alive in the older man’s face.
Deep-seated