AA 2.indd - Colnaghi

Introduction
The present exhibition explores the varying
ways in which artists have chosen to depict
themselves and the making of their art. As
such it embraces portraits and self-portraits,
studio interiors, still lifes of artists’ materials
and studies of models; it takes in academies,
themselves outgrowths of studios. It also
includes the collectors, patrons and dealers
who were to be found in the studios and
at academy views and in the museums,
which, from the early nineteenth century,
played an increasingly important role in the
consumption of art.
The delineation of the artist is seen in its
purest form in the self-portrait. Here the
preoccupations of the artist can be honestly
examined, because he has no sitter to flatter
or patron to please. The history of the selfportrait
really begins with Dürer. Prior to his
time, there are a few direct self-portraits and
artists tended to appear in the guise of St Luke,
or as bystanders. Sometimes, as in Van Eyck’s
famous reflected self-portrait in the convex
mirror of The Arnolfini Portrait (National
Gallery, London), they introduced themselves
obliquely into their pictures with the same
stealth that Hitchcock used to appear in his
own films, a conceit that evidently appealed
three centuries later to Fragonard’s sister-in-law
Marguerite Gerard (Plates 1 & 2) who painted
her reflection in a ball. But these images of
artists were essentially self-effacing, perhaps
reflecting their relatively lowly standing.
The improved status of artists in the High
Renaissance is reflected in the growth in the
number of self-portraits, a trend given further
impetus by the tradition in Rome in the later
sixteenth century of presenting self-portraits
to the newly founded Academy of St Luke.
Some artists, such as Van Dyck, preferred
not to present themselves primarily as artists,
but as connoisseurs or courtiers: basking
symbolically in the warmth of royal patronage
in the case of his famous Self-Portrait with a
Sunfl ower (Royal Collection, England), or as
Paris, judge of beauty in his self-portrait in the
Wallace Collection. By contrast, other selfportraits
display a keen interest in the processes
of making art and very little concern to project
an elevated image. In his wild and almost
caricatural self-portrait drawing (illustrated
back cover) the young Toulouse-Lautrec, his
stunted body emphasised by the large brushes
he wields, shows himself in the act of painting
and is quite unconcerned to project the sort
of gentlemanly image conventional in the
eighteenth century. By contrast the flower
painter Spaendonck (Plate 6), lays down his
crayon holder to welcome the spectator from
a Louis XVI chair more redolent of the salon
than the studio. In Tischbein’s remarkable
self-portrait in masquerade costume (Plate
4), there are no indications of his professional
calling and the only allusion to the art of
painting is an indirect one: the mask, a
symbol associated with allegorical depictions