There's nothing to tell which it is, and all your looking for some peculiar self-consciousness in the eyes will yield nothing.Actually, the first picture in this show is in that doubtful category It's by Jan van Eyck, that's certain But whether or not it's of Jan van Eyck is moot A middle-aged man in a turban eyes the viewer steadily There's some evidence that it could be a self-portrait. Portraits have eye contact too.We know the facts in those two cases But in hundreds of others, we don't. Or look at Manet's portrait of the painter Eva Gonzales, seen at work on a flower painting, brush and palette in hand. It might well come over as a self-portrait if you didn't spot the style Self-portraiture can move away from the mirror. Look at Suzanne Valadon's The Blue Room, where a large woman in pyjamas is lolling on a bed, cigarette in mouth, not facing out It's the artist, but if you didn't know, you'd never tell. All these are indicators that you have a self-portrait before you.But they're not reliable There are self-portraits that don't have them There are straight portraits that do. It's a brilliant portrait and a brilliant self-portrait.Hold on, though.
06/11 - 09/11 Obtain Texas Rangers Tickets performing in Fenway Park, Minute Maid Park. Texas Rangers is performing in Boston, Houston and Oakland. Texas Rangers tickets
07/11 - 09/11 Attain Zac Brown Band Tickets performing in Cheyenne Frontier Days, Jazz Aspen Snowmass. Zac Brown Band is performing in Cheyenne, Aspen and Charlotte. Zac Brown Band tickets
08/11 - 10/11 Find Journey Tickets playing in Fedex Forum, Hollywood Bowl. Journey is playing in Memphis, Los Angeles and Syracuse. Journey tickets
Aren't there actually some differences? Surely self-portraiture has its tell-tale signs, its typical symptoms Yes, it has some. The person in the picture is often seen at work on a picture, or shown holding a brush and palette, sometimes in the wrong hands. The person is looking straight out - or maybe not quite straight, but giving a sideways glance, with the face in three-quarter view, because for painting purposes they need to be able to flick their eyes between mirror and canvas, while holding their head steady They may have a look of intense concentration The frame of the mirror may appear in the picture. The picture can work equally well as a study in third person character, or in first person self-regard It can be imagined either way. True, it's possible that (say) Ingres's massive portrait of Monsieur Bertin is not the self-portrait that this 19th-century Parisian gentleman would actually have painted of himself But someone could have painted it as a self-portrait. You can expand massively the field of self-portraiture, simply by deciding to treat straight portraits - of which there are many, many more - as self-portraits, too.
(And now, for good measure, go back along the self-portraits, and read them all as portraits.)This looks like an answer to the distribution problem. The self-portrait is unfairly restricted to artists? But only if you insist. Someone facing a painter doesn't appear different from someone facing a mirror. Did you think there'd be some "I'm gazing at myself" look in the eyes of self-portraits, that straight portraits lack? No, you can easily interpret one as the other. You take the image that an artist has given to a sitter, and imagine it as the sitter's own self-image. Straight portraits can yield all the self-portrait feelings, the full range of frankness and phoneyness, arrogance and anxiety.