Self-Portrait

Feuerbach’s striking preference for self-portraits in a proudly distant pose — often with a cigarette — is not merely due to personal vanity: it also expresses the artist’s claims to social acceptability on the grounds of the aristocracy of the intellect. Feuerbach painted this self-portrait at the age of forty-four, buoyed up by having completed two major works, the second version of The Symposium and his second Battle of the Amazons. His plain, collarless garment looks like a studio overall, and yet there is nothing bohemian about the appearance of this well-groomed, extremely self-aware, handsome man. Venetian portraits of the late Renaissance have clearly not only influenced the work’s formal simplicity, whose very calm lends authority to the distinct movement of the head, and where the background is only interrupted by the edge of one wall: the fine grey coloration of the work also derives from Venetian precursors.