Why do painters paint themselves so often? The easy answer is that the model is free and always at hand. The pictures here suggest more. A painter could use his own face to claim a rank, to test a technique, to record an illness, or to say what no client would have paid for, and each picture keeps a trace of how it was made.
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How These Were Chosen
A self-portrait is a picture in which the painter is also the subject. Painters first slipped their faces into crowds in religious scenes. Pictures of the painter alone spread over the 1400s and 1500s, and English named the genre only in the 1820s.
Every picture here shows the painter alone, so faces hidden in a crowd were left out, and no painter appears twice. Each one also uses the face to argue something, whether a rank, a skill or a state of mind.
The mirror sets one trap for every painter: it swaps left and right, and so it reverses the hand that holds the brush. Some hid that hand, others moved it or gave it a borrowed gesture, and many of these pictures say as much through the hands as through the face.
12. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940)
At the center of Frida Kahlo's chest hangs a dead hummingbird, black wings spread, from a necklace of thorns wound around her throat. She faces the viewer straight on, against a wall of broad green leaves. Kahlo painted the picture in 1940, and the date matters. A year earlier, Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist she had married in 1929, had filed for divorce.
That is where the bird comes in. In Mexico, dried hummingbirds called chuparrosas have been used as love charms for centuries, so the one on her chest is often read as a charm that failed her. Kahlo left the canvas untitled, and the long name it carries now simply lists what hangs from her neck.
The rest of the picture ties the charm to the woman who wears it. The thorns cut into her neck and thin lines of blood run down toward the bird, yet her face gives nothing away. Kahlo drew the bird's spread wings in the same shape as the single dark line of her joined brows, so the charm and the face share one mark. Scholars have argued at length over what the thorns and the bird mean, in political, cultural and religious terms.
Around that still face, the animals are left to supply the movement. Behind her right shoulder a spider monkey plays with the thorns, eyes on its own hands, and over her left shoulder a black cat with pale blue eyes peers out of the leaves.
At a Glance
Artist: Frida Kahlo (1907 to 1954)
Painted: 1940
Medium: Oil on canvas mounted on board
Size: 61.25 × 47 cm (24.1 × 18.5 in)
Where to see it: Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
11. Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889)
From the bottom edge of the picture, a hand with no arm attached rises and holds a snake between two fingers. Above it, Paul Gauguin painted his own head under a golden halo, on flat fields of red and yellow, with apples hanging from a branch at the upper left. He made it in 1889 at Le Pouldu, a seaside hamlet in Brittany, and the wooden panel under the paint was never meant to be a picture at all.