Self-portrait

A self-portrait is a likeness of an artist made by that artist — painted, drawn, carved or modelled. It is a variety of the portrait, not a separate genre. A self-portrait may be an independent work or a “hidden” figure of the author inside a narrative or landscape composition, which is why the self-portrait status of some early images remains a conjecture.

Self-portraits were rare in antiquity and the Middle Ages; medieval masters sometimes inserted their own likeness into a composition as a kind of signature. The self-portrait became an independent phenomenon in the Renaissance. Artists mostly painted themselves without a commission, so such works depended less on the conventions of the day and were usually intimate in character: the artist at work, with palette and brushes, in the studio, among family.

The earliest known self-portrait in Ukrainian painting is found on the signed icon The Crucifixion (1691, V. Lypskyi), where the author showed himself beside the donor’s family. Encyclopaedias name the work by A. Polubotok (1801) as the first self-portrait made as a separate work. The genre holds a special place in the art of Taras Shevchenko; at the turn of the twentieth century self-portraits, and whole cycles of them, were made by Oleksandr Murashko, Oleksa Novakivskyi and others. Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich painted his Self-Portrait (1908 or 1910–1911) before Suprematism, in saturated planes of colour against a background of red figures.