The Self-Portrait, the Mirror & the Studio. 7

Three Views of a Self-Portrait,

Poussin’s Self-Portraits are examples of the inventive uses of genre in the seventeenth-century. Many baroque artists were fascinated by expression, thus we have Bernini basing the face of his David on his own features; according to sources, he had a friend hold up the mirror so he could observe his own expression as he put his hand in the fire. In the Netherlands we have Rembrandt peering into a mirror in order to observe his expressions which in some cases gives him the look of a disturbed person. We never actually see mirrors in Rembrandt’s self-portraits or pictures of other artists; but we do have a striking exception to the rule in Northern Europe: the Triple Portrait by the Austrian painter Johannes Gumpp, executed in 1646 (above).  In this extraordinary image Gumpp shows himself three times: in person, in his studio painting, in the mirror and on the canvas. Here the distinction between the physical mirror in the studio and the “mirror” of the painting is made; the artist has to continually look into the former in order to realize the latter. The difference between the two is also seen in relation to doing and seeing. Gumpp regards himself in the mirror, a purely optical strategy and uses his hands to paint the image he sees, a mechanical activity. The skill needed in realising the Triple Self-Portrait is to negotiate between hand and eye, which inevitably leaves a gap, a blind spot which is neither painting nor the artist’s studio. The historian of the brush and the mirror would wait until 1959 when the American illustrator and artist Norman Rockwell produced his own Triple Self-Portrait which with its pinned copies of Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso seems to suggest that Rockwell wanted to add himself to the pantheon of great portrayers of the self. Rockwell has made a good start with a massive delineation of himself and an equally unmissable signature which may indicate the self image has been “inscribed in advance.” ¹

1Joanna Woods-Marsden, Renaissance Self-Portraiture, 31.