Titian sits at a table, this painter of kings and king of painters, one hand tensed against it, the other braced upon his thigh with the fingers powerfully outspread. A fellow artist who had been admitted to his studio in Venice reported that in these later years Titian often painted directly with his fingers, and one might imagine that the artist painted these magnificent hands with his own fingers, his supreme sense of touch evident in their very tips. But Titian is not painting in this self-portrait, of course – he is waiting, and this is the central tension of the picture. The body faces front, massively present, but the eyes turn away towards some invisible point beyond the picture. That you should still be here, that he should be here at all: these are the burdensome but inevitable conditions of self-portraiture, of appearing and being seen. But Titian manages to command your attention by diverting it, his eyes glancing free of yours.
Where to look when submitting oneself to scrutiny? It is a question that presents itself to the public-minded self-portraitist every time. In reality, we usually have some sense of who might be looking at us, especially if the circumstances are familiar. But artists can only see one person looking back from the mirror and have to imagine all the rest – anyone and everyone who might one day see their image – to compose a representative face. The politician filmed in some satellite studio unable to see his interrogator may be analogous, having no rival eyes on which to latch and forced to frame an expression without any guiding response. Under these circumstances, interviewees frequently look up, down or wanderingly off-centre, flustered by the voice in their ear, infuriated by the questions, or just withdrawn into tense concentration.
Self-Portrait, c. 1560 Titian (c. 1488–1576)
The eyes of self-portraits can expose an artist in just this way as dazed or perplexed, lost in drought or self-consciousness, or just defeated by the harsh technicalities. But few have retreated so far into self-consciousness as to have forgotten the world altogether. No matter how intimate the exchange between self and self-image, not many self-portraitists address only themselves, muttering alone in the studio. Self-portraiture is rarely an act of total introspection; attention is what it generally seeks. Some artists aim straight for the public address; others do so while making a pretence of seemly privacy – lowering the eyes, looking away off into the distance. Still others simply want to appear intimate, without giving much away. Joshua Reynolds manages to combine all three just by playing upon vision as a conceit.
Reynolds painted a great number of self-portraits with the public squarely in mind and many of them are unbearably self-serving. But in the best and most original, painted in his mid-twenties when he was just up to London from a Devonshire village and about to set off for the glories of Rome, his sights are set on the future and the road is open before him.
The dynamic young hero stares straight ahead, shielding his eyes against the light with one hand. Literally, he is looking at himself in the mirror but the gesture implies far wider horizons. With the maulstick held across the body like a sword, he also looks ready for the cut and thrust. He is on guard: the artist as saluting swordsman.
It is a variation on the studio self-portrait – the palette, the stick for steadying the hand at the canvas, even a hint of that canvas – but such an advance on the usual scenario. Reynolds makes a character of himself in a drama that is all about seeing and being seen and trying to get a better look at the world. The world, and himself, and his audience, and his painting – the gesture is pointedly specific yet all-encompassing; and then comes a further twist. His eyes are so deep in shadow, like those of Rembrandt, Reynolds’s hero, that it is impossible to tell whether they are truly fixed upon the viewer; and the implication of that shielding hand, what is more, is that it is in any case too bright to make out what lies ahead, that the artist can hardly see. Artist and viewer are ships in the night. Yet the hand against the light tells of a sighting!
‘A beautiful eye makes silence eloquent, a kind eye makes contradiction an assent, an enraged eye makes beauty deformed. This little member gives life to every other part about us; that is to say, every other part would be mutilated were not its force represented more by the eye than even by itself.’
Joseph Addison
Self-Portrait, c. 1747–49 Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92)
Reynolds painted himself in Rembrandt beret, in the doctoral robes of Oxford University, contemplating a bust of Homer in the manner of Aristotle in Rembrandt’s etching. His sense of achievement was highly developed and his self-portraits are ceremonial – the one painted when he got the freedom of his home town, the one for the king when he took over the Royal Academy – and made for public display within a month or two, usually at the Royal Academy. But he sometimes produced less grandstanding works in which he comes more modestly downstage. In a late painting, now deaf, he cups a hand to his ear the better to hear us in a poignant reprise of this early gesture (his vision would eventually fade as well). Both pictures have a theatrical intimacy – Garrick on stage – that seems to single you out, to signal to you and you alone. They crave, and declare, an audience with these focusing gestures. But although Reynolds salutes the viewer, he has eyes not just for you but the whole wide world.
The eyes of most self-portraits are outwardly directed, seeking to be seen, but they may signify inner vision just as keenly. A head in close up, eyes like dark stars, was rare when Tintoretto painted himself in the sixteenth century but it became very common with Romanticism. The self is concentrated in the mind, the mind in the eyes, twin wells of feeling and thought. Cogito ergo sum translates as video ergo sum, and what I am may be manifest in my powers of vision. Self-portraiture’s special look goes well with this idea of the artist as seer, possessing gifted powers of insight. It is a look popular among the young – Samuel Palmer, at twenty-one, appears charismatically far-sighted, although it is partly the effect of not being able to draw both eyes in focus – and mocked by Picasso in old age. At ninety-one, eyes like mismatched marbles in a primitive mask, one dim and myopic, the other stuck open for ever like some dreadful twist of fate, he is halfway between animal and crazed old totem.
Absorption, 1919 Paul Klee (1879–1940)
There is a little self-portrait drawing by Paul Klee where the eyes are tight shut, so that one deduces that it cannot have been made by looking in a mirror but must effectively be a self-portrait from within, and quite possibly with sex in mind, for there is orgasmic concentration in the features. But what it enchantingly expresses is this idea that inspiration, vision, imagination, soul, everything that really matters in art, come in the end from within. And an extra quirk is that humorous Klee can never be accused of self-regard (an old accusation against self-portrayers) for he was not even looking at himself. What these eyes must have seen, what thoughts, what dreams: Klee’s self-portrait draws one intensely into his mind without following the usual invitation through the open eyes, a sweet retort to the old line about souls and windows. And one remembers that he did not make any distinction between the inner and outer worlds in his work. ‘Art does not render the visible,’ Klee said, ‘it renders visible.’ He was speaking mystically and what is rendered visible in his art is surely at the very least his own spirit – lightsome, benign, visionary, intimate and as comical as this little self-portrait.
What the eyes have seen, literally and metaphorically: