Think "creative genius" and a parade of self-portraits from the history of art, each brooding intensely before an unfinished can...
Think "creative genius" and a parade of self-portraits from the history of art, each brooding intensely before an unfinished canvas, flashes across your mind. You know the ones: from the rumpled nobility of Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665) to the smouldering introspection of Vincent van Gogh's iconic Self-Portrait as a Painter (1886), from the bashful gaze of Francisco Goya's Self-Portrait in a Studio (1790) to the circumspect squint of Paul Gauguin's Self-Portrait with a Palette (1894). So masculine is the stereotype of the aloof artist, lifting his paintbrush like an existential barbell freighted with psychological weight, it is almost unimaginable that the tradition should have begun with a corseted 20-year-old young woman, whose contribution to cultural history and to shaping our modern idea of the artistic temperament – trapped in a prism of preoccupied thought – has gone largely unappreciated for nearly half a millennium.
There is every reason to conclude, as art historians have, that an absorbing self-portrait by a gifted young Flemish Renaissance painter by the name of Caterina van Hemessen, painted in 1548, is likely the first self-portrayal of an artist, male or female, at work at the easel. Such attributions are a risky business, of course. Just ask the endless succession of nominees for inventor of abstract painting (now Kandinsky, now Hilma af Klint, now JMW Turner…). There's always a chance that an earlier example, unfairly forgotten by time, will come to light.
But in the case of Hemessen's transfixing masterpiece, it isn't simply the posture – the young woman depicting herself in meta-mid-brushstroke as she sets out to create the very same painting that we see before us – that distinguishes the work as one of the most pioneering in the history of image-making. The depth and complexity of the small, oil-on-oak panel's reflection on the very nature of creativity and self-invention is incontestably ground-breaking and changed forever the way artists presented themselves to the world. - from source bbc.com
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