The artist from behind

What’s happening when artists choose to portray themselves in their work?  The self-portrait was an invention of the Renaissance, but it’s just as common today, in painting (Jenny Saville’s work, now on show in a big retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, is a striking example) and in many other forms. 

Perhaps the most famous self-imager is Rembrandt, thanks to his relentless concentration on the facts of his own face, which he painted around a hundred times over some forty years.  His absorption in trying to capture his ageing self has inspired many artists since, including Vincent Van Gogh, Egon Schiele, Freda Kahlo and Jenny Saville herself.  A sub-genre of the self-portrait is ‘the artist as hero’, a type made famous by Albrecht Dürer. 

There are many, less obvious variations: the hidden portrait-in-a-mirror, as in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini double-portrait and Clara Peeters’s Still life with cheeses, almonds and pretzels, where her tiny image shines out of the goblet’s pewter lid.  And then there’s the mock-portrait.  My favourite among these is Thomas Patch’s self-portrait as an ox, with its Latin inscription, ‘the person who humbles himself will be exalted’.

What’s more intriguing is when artists include themselves, but without drawing attention to their presence – specifically by depicted themselves from the back.  I’ve been looking recently at how the eighteenth-century Welsh painter Richard Wilson seems to have placed himself, almost surreptitiously, in some of his landscapes of British scenes.  (You can’t, of course, be certain, that these images are self-portraits).  One of them occurs in Wilson’s picture of Caernarfon Castle, painted around 1745, where the artist sits on the banks of the Seiont opposite the castle, bent over a canvas on an easel and overlooked by a man who stands behind, observing the work.

The ’sketching artist’ inhabits other canvasses by Wilson, like Wilton House from the south-east, where two admirers scrutinise the picture. Another interesting example appears in one of Wilson’s master works Llyn Cau, Cader Idris, painted much later, around 1765-7. The miniature figure sits on the grassy hill in the foreground of the painting, again bending over an easel, in the act of capturing the very scene Wilson is showing us.  But there’s a difference from the earlier paintings.  The standing man is replaced here by an interested cow, which, though slightly closer to the viewer, appears to turn its head towards the artist.

Stock foreground or middle-ground figures are, of course, very common in Wilson’s landscapes, and in similar pictures by his forebears and contemporaries.  They lend scale to the composition and they add human interest.  Often Wilson uses fishermen, boatmen or decorous maidens in this role.  But let’s assume that, in his depiction of artists, he’s painting images of himself, and not those of anonymous sketchers.  What’s he up to when he decides to insert them?

Many of Wilson’s landscapes were commissioned – he painted Llyn Cau, Cader Idris for Sir Roger Mostyn – and it could be that the artist-in-the-picture was a sort of signature.  Or more than that: a reminder to Sir Roger and his friends of the critical, central function of the painter in producing the finished canvas.  Though the artist may have stood several rungs down on the social ladder from his aristocratic patron, he was still justly proud of his profession and his great skill.  In future Mostyn wouldn’t be able to look at the picture without recalling the artist who made it.

If this is Wilson’s distinctive ‘voice’, in this and other paintings, it’s not a loud one.  He may have been by nature a self-effacing character, and a small sketch of the artist was all he needed to ‘own’ the picture as much as his patron would own it.  It could also be that his self-image contained an element of self-deprecating humour.  To replace the curious human observer with an admiring cow in the Cader Idris canvas might suggest so.

Could Wilson also have been aware of the metaphysical, Russian doll implications of placing himself in the foreground of Llyn Cau, Cader Idris?  Presumably the Richard Wilson in the picture is also depicting Llyn Cau, and Craig Cau above it.  And, if he is, might he also be including, in the foreground, a small image of himself sketching the scene?  And so on, ad infinitum.

Richard Wilson is so reticent that it’s hard to be sure what he might have intended.  (The same is true of the significance of the enigmatic ‘man with the spyglass’ in the same painting.)  Other artists who placed figures in their landscapes with their backs to the viewer were not so shy.  In Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Wanderer over the sea of fog such a figure (a so-called ‘Rückenfigur’) and probable self-portrait – stands heroically against a sublime mountain landscape. 

Perhaps the most famous ‘artist from behind’ appears in Johannes Vermeer’s The art of painting.  The title is Vermeer’s own, not a later invention, and he seems to have kept the painting at home, right up to his death, to show to visiting potential buyers as proof of his technique and virtuosity.  These facts alert us to different possible readings of the picture.

An artist sits at the easel in his studio, beginning to paint a demure young woman dressed as Clio, the Muse of History: she wears a laurel wreath and holds a large book and trumpet.  History ensures fame.  Vermeer is celebrating the lasting art of the painter, through his choice of subject and also by showing off the brilliance and meticulous detail of his painting technique.  Since the picture is an allegory or an emblem, the painter seems to be The Painter, not a self-portrait.  His slashed silk top is over-formal for a dirty studio, and an out-of-date fashion.  The pre-independence map of the Netherlands and the Hapsburg-era chandelier also belong to an age gone by – as if History is already baked into the painting.

Yet, for all its subtle symbolising, this picture shows a particular place, a room in Delft one day around 1666, a real room that contains real things.  The clear light from the invisible window, the folded-back tapestry curtain, the glinting chandelier, the crinkled map – all of them Vermeer paints, as he usually does, with the eye of a documentalist. The Painter, too, is no abstract symbol, either, but a real person: a dumpy man with untidy, frizzy hair jammed under his black felt hat, his legs splayed forward awkwardly under the easel, his stockings falling down, his doughy right hand resting on a maul.  As Bryan Jay Woolf says in his book Vermeer and the invention of seeing, there’s something slightly comical about him.  Maybe the figure does, after all, contain a touch of (self-deprecating) self-image?  It’s no surprise that Vermeer, as far as we know, never painted a conventional portrait of himself.  Perhaps the device of the artist-from-behind in The art of painting offered him a rare chance to show his hand. Or at least one of them.

It’s hard to be certain. What you can fairly say is that by showing only the artist’s back and withholding his face from us, Vermeer deliberately obscures whatever we might otherwise interpret as the nature of the relationship between artist and model. In this painting, as in many others, he makes a virtue of reticence – and silence. The trumpet is unsounded, and I’d be prepared to bet that the artist’s lips, like the girl’s, are closed.