Self-Portrait, 1813 Anton Graff (1736–1813)
Self-Portrait with Spectacles, 1771 Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779)
This is precisely the look of many portraits where the sitter is supposedly a cut above – the royal portrait, say, or the duke on horseback – but most portraiture aims for some kind of connection. The Italian artist Giulio Paolini made the point in the 1960s by showing just how disconcerting it feels if this communion is deliberately thwarted. Paolini displayed a black and white reproduction of a Renaissance painting, Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Young Man, which shows a beautiful youth staring very candidly, and captivatingly, back at the viewer; or so it seems. But Paolini killed that illusion at a stroke simply by calling his version Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto.
Common sense says this can only be true, that the sitter’s eyes were always on Lotto while he worked; but common sense is exactly what we naturally suppress when looking at the eye-to-eye portrait. It is our willing suspension of disbelief, our contribution to the occasion, and if the young man is no longer looking at us, if his eyes are refocused on someone else, then the party is over. The painting withdraws, becomes the record of two dead people looking at each other in some previous century, an effect of deflation and exclusion. It is the end of the rapport most portraitists want and exactly the opposite of self-portraiture’s aspiring eye-to-eye transmission of a first person encounter.
But an inept self-portrait will prove Paolini’s point quite unintentionally just by botching the eyes. The artist gets into a loop of looking at himself in the glass and reproducing that look that meets nothing but itself.
The Swiss-born painter Anton Graff is doing his best to see what he looks like, visor in position, brows pinched with effort. He poses as if turning aside from his latest commission, a portrait of some portly and presumably once-famous patron, but the pretence is not plausible for a moment. The Graff in the picture who wants to show himself doing what he does best – he was a very successful portraitist whose sitters included Schiller, Gluck and Frederick the Great – cannot really be working on that portrait, since he must be working on this self-portrait instead. And sure enough, he is trying so hard to paint both eyes in focus that you know he is really painting his own face. Graff’s gaze swithers; he cannot see us for the struggle to see himself.
A few decades earlier, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin looks over the top of his pince-nez, one eyebrow raised with perceptible interest in an attitude of scrutiny that could not appear more sociable by comparison. The pose is almost humorous – who is not familiar with the rhetoric of lowering one’s spectacles as if pretending to consider someone else more pointedly – and the artist is at home in his jaunty bandanna, neck cloth loosely knotted against the cold, a note of domestic intimacy that runs through his work. But Chardin, now in his seventies, is both watchful and grave.
His eyesight failing and the smell of the oil paint he had used for half a century now making him ill, Chardin was forced to give up oil for pastel instead. The light focusing through the lens, the steel frames, the eyes with their glint of curiosity: all are achieved with this tricky medium, so easily blended and yet so fragile and fugitive.
Chardin is one of those artists whose self-portrait comes as a surprise – not because the face is so intelligent, for he has to be at least this clever to be the greatest still-life painter in art, but because it exists in the first place. Born in Paris in 1699, he never left the city except for a trip to Versailles. He has nothing to say about the wars, politics or public misery of his times, still less the private excesses of the aristocracy, although he must have seen it all for he had a city-centre flat in the Louvre. Chardin stayed at home, secretive, industrious, painting his apricots, strawberries and teacups, hymning the softness of a dead hare, the molten glow of a cherry. His power of touch runs all the way from the silvery condensation on a glass of water to the reflected glory inside a copper pan and the downy cheek of the housemaid dreaming over her dishes. Diderot, his earliest champion, called him ‘The Great Magician’, trying to fathom the mysteries of his art, of those muffled rooms where everything is misty and slightly distanced and warm air circulates like breath. But nobody ever saw him paint and scarcely a single anecdote attaches to Chardin’s life. That he should have left anything as personal as a self-portrait goes against the person of his art.
Self-Portrait, Wide-Eyed, 1630 Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69)
That it is outwardly turned and makes such vivid eye contact is even less to be expected. For the look is distinctly interpersonal, making a quizzical connection with the viewer from the centre of the image, the perceptual heart of the picture. Chardin turns the same unhurried, penetrating gaze upon himself normally used to gauge the weight of a plum, the quiddity of an egg. You feel what it is to be one of his subjects, and what it is to be Chardin, eyes testing the truth of life directly.
Rembrandt is acting with his eyes. He hooks you by reeling back and showing the whites. The etching has been given the title Self-Portrait, Wide-Eyed but it might as well be called ‘Shocked to See You’. It is as if you personally have caused this effect: you come before him and he reacts, that is the one-two action of the image. The meeting of eyes amounts to an incident. And it is the same with almost all of Rembrandt’s self-portraits: he paints the eyes as pinpricks in shadow, or black holes, or dark discs you have to search for in the gloaming, trying to make the man out. He squints and he leers and he creases up to get a better look at you, a better sense of who you might be, identity always at issue.
Self-Portrait, c. 1655 Lorenzo Lippi (1606–65)
One of Rembrandt’s contemporaries, the Florentine poet and painter Lorenzo Lippi, goes even further with this line of inquiry, this idea that artists’ eyes do not just follow but actively seek you out, questioning who you are, with comic trepidation in his case. Lippi turns timidly towards us from the safety of the shadows, one eye out of sight as if hiding round the corner, the other swivelling fearfully in its socket. Who is there? The picture puts everyone on the spot.
Lippi’s ambition, he said, was to write poetry as he spoke and to paint as he saw3 and this likeness is quick and colloquial. But it is also a neat parody of the eyeballing business of self-portraiture: here is an artist bold enough to paint a portrait of himself yet who seems almost too scared to look. He has one eye on the viewer’s amusement.
Lippi seems to have been better known for his humour than his portraits in any case, spending much of his life at the court of Innsbruck painting respectful likenesses of the aristocrats while at the same time writing a serial mock epic satirizing their behaviour and mores to the mirth of devoted readers back home.4 His jesting image is now in the Uffizi self-portrait collection, still amusing the people of Florence. Unlike most of the many hundreds of paintings in that collection, it was not made especially for the occasion yet seems to have its current neighbours in mind, a mouse that hardly dares squeak among the great lions all around it whose pomp it quietly mocks. With his one-eyed peep Lippi achieves in a blink, what is more, what other artists can only hope for: an intimacy of connection, a kind of wink, in his case, that immediately brings the self-portrait to life.
Where to look? Anywhere but the mirror is