A self-portrait is a picture an artist makes of their own face. For centuries painters worked from a mirror, which reverses left and right.
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The clearest trace of that reversal is a picture Vincent van Gogh painted in Arles, in the south of France, in January 1889. A few weeks earlier, after a heated argument with Paul Gauguin, the painter who shared his house, he had cut off most of his left ear.
He made the canvas a week after leaving the hospital where he had been treated. He sits in a fur cap and a heavy green coat, below a Japanese print, one of the colored woodblock pictures he collected.
Yet the bandage covers his right ear. In the glass, the wounded left side appeared on the right, and he painted what he saw.
Pictures like this one are far older than their name. The English word "self-portrait" appears only in the nineteenth century. Until then, people named both roles, as in "the portrait of Rembrandt painted by himself."
The mirror explains how such a picture looks. Why an artist turned to his own features is another matter, and the answer changed from age to age: to sign a work, to train the hand, to show a skill, to claim a profession, or to save the cost of a model.
Jan van Eyck's frame
The habit begins in the fifteenth century, when artists first portrayed themselves on a panel of their own rather than tucked into a larger scene…
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