Self-Portrait

Dickinson grew up in Buffalo, New York, and studied at the Pratt Institute, The Art Students League under William Merritt Chase and Frank Vincent DuMond, and the School of the National Academy of Design. He later continued his studies at the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy and working under Charles Hawthorne at the Cape Cod School of Art .

Dickinson's somber-toned, introspective paintings, characterized by complex perspective spaces and compositional juxtapositionings which suggest relationships to both cubism and surrealism, steadily gained an appreciative audience. The Albright Gallery, Buffalo, presented a one-man exhibition of Dickinson's work in 1929; in New York, his work was shown annually by the Passedoit Gallery from 1936 to 1942. He was represented in an Academy exhibitions only twice prior to his election to membership: in the Winter exhibition of 1922, and in the Winter exhibition of 1929, when he submitted one of his most important works, The Fossil Hunters (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) which was awarded an Altman Prize. In the annual exhibition of 1949 he received the Lockman prize, and in 1958 the Altman prize.

The artist's daughter described the creation of this self-portrait: "he adapted the actual room to suit the painting. He arranged the walls of his 'space' to suit himself and brought the skylight into the picture by using tilted mirrors. He was accustomed to drawing on the studio's bare walls as he worked out exercises in perspective, and so he painted in one of those drawings, but also foreshortened it so that the cube drawn on the wall appears in the painting as a diamond." Dickinson frequently borrowed this painting from the Academy to represent his work in informal faculty exhibitions and presentations related to fellowship competitions.