A Face To The World: On Self-Portraits by Laura Cumming

Self-portraits - by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and others - are among the world's best-known and best-loved images. We feel we know those artists like old friends just from looking at their pictures. But how much can a portrait tell us about its creator? That is just one of the questions raised by this thoughtful study by Laura Cumming, art critic of the Observer.

Self-portrait paintings are almost all alike in one respect: they are painted by someone looking in the mirror. Is there anything else to say about them as a group? In one way, the answer seems to be "no". Self-portraits are as unalike as the artists who make them.

The prospect of self-contemplation seems to freeze some with embarrassment, such as poor Henry Raeburn, who comes into a chapter entitled Stage Fright. Under the impression that he had to submit a picture of himself before being elected to the Royal Academy, Raeburn made heavy weather of the task, which he obviously hated - only to discover that the whole business was a misunderstanding.

Other artists, such as Courbet, give the impression that they can't think of a more fascinating subject than their own features. Had blokey, boozy Courbet painted any other man as often as he painted himself, Cumming conjectures, "one might have thought him in love".

Narcissism is a vice of which Albrecht Dürer is often accused but Cumming acquits him, on the grounds that his selfportraits, especially the one from 1500 in which he seems to represent himself as Christ, are just too weird for that. Even so, one suspects Dürer fancied himself.

In recent decades, no-nonsense art historians have pooh-poohed the idea that artists such as Rembrandt were indulging in spiritual autobiography. On the contrary, they suggest, Rembrandt was turning out a line of product: his self-portraits were strong sellers. Cumming doesn't accept this. Why shouldn't they be both visual selfanalysis and popular with collectors?

She raises another intriguing question: what did Rembrandt look like? He painted himself often but all the faces look different (the same is true of Lucian Freud, a modern master of the selfportrait). Rembrandt might not have been that interested in likeness but probably wanted to produce as good a new painting as possible, not just a repetition of the last. Artists, after all, are not on oath to tell nothing but the truth. Many lie visually - or at least fantasise a bit. Courbet posed soulfully with a cello on which he could not play a note.

Cumming's book has no general theory on self-portraiture - this is probably wise but it makes this study less than clear-cut. It is a lavishly illustrated production, though a minor frustration is that sometimes there is a discussion of a work but no image.

This is probably best approached as a book of essays. Cumming is good on Velázquez, Dürer and David, for example, less so on Van Gogh, whose most disturbingly intense self-image she unexpectedly finds full of calm and even "uplifting quietude".

Van Gogh, though, has one of the best lines in the book. "It is difficult to know yourself ", he wrote from St Rémy to his brother Theo, "but it isn't easy to paint yourself either". Nor is writing about self-portraiture straightforward - but this is an original and thought-provoking meditation on the subject.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Focusing on the art of self-portraiture, this effortlessly engaging exploration of the lives of artists sheds fascinating light on some of the most extraordinary portraits in art history. Self-portraits catch your eye. They seem to do it deliberately. Walk into any art gallery and they draw attention to themselves. Come across them in the world's museums and you get a strange shock of recognition, rather like glimpsing your own reflection. For in picturing themselves artists reveal something far deeper than their own physical looks: the truth about how they hope to be viewed by the world, and how they wish to see themselves. In this beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Laura Cumming, art critic of the Observer, investigates the drama of the self-portrait, from Durer, Rembrandt and Velazquez to Munch, Picasso, Warhol and the present day. She considers how and why self-portraits look as they do and what they reveal about the artist's innermost sense of self -- as well as the curious ways in which they may imitate our behaviour in real life. Drawing on art, literature, history, philosophy and biography to examine the creative process in an entirely fresh way, Cumming offers a riveting insight into the intimate truths and elaborate fictions of self-portraiture and the lives of those who practise it. A work of remarkable depth, scope and power, this is a book for anyone who has ever wondered about the strange dichotomy between the innermost self and the self we choose to present for posterity -- our face to the world.