Artist Self Portrait

  Self-portraiture allowed the young Degas a means to practise his craft and hone his artistic skill without the need for a model. It also offered the youthful artist a tool for exploring his identity and of scrutinising his relationship to his developing career. <Source : Christie's>

  Only very late in life, when Picasso was indeed confronting his mortality, did he return to a serious focus on self-portraits. In 1972, only months before he died, Picasso created several skull-like depictions of himself, looking like apparitions from beyond the grave. These leave little doubt as to where his thoughts were directed. <Source : Art Eyewitness>

  Vincent van Gogh left about 40 self-portraits. The reason why Van Gogh painted so many self-portraits seems to have been greatly influenced by Dutch masters such as Rembrandt. However, he wanted to include in his self-portrait psychological values, such as the expression of desire for something that he lacked, not just the influence he received from an old master.

Gauguin thought that artists had creative abilities on par with God. And he was proud of his own originality, which was differentiated from impressionism. However, he was suffering from critics and the public who did not understand his artistry.  The driving force behind continuing his own art world in this pain was his pride as an artist and his attitude of self-respect. His self-portraits show his attitude toward himself as an artist. 

  The German Expressionist Max Beckmann created more than eighty self-portraits during his career - many of them prints, which afforded him a range of marks, lines, and textures with which to articulate his own shifting attitudes and emotional states. <Source : Brooklyn Museum>

  For Marc Chagall, his art and his life had always been inextricably intertwined. In every period of his career, his paintings, drawings, and prints were powerfully informed and shaped by the events of his life, with different moments and experiences leaving an indelible mark on his creative vision.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the prevalence of the self-portrait in his art, a subject which he returned to time and again over the course of his long and productive career, each composition providing a revealing insight into his developing sense of artistic and personal identity at important junctures in his life, reflecting the ways in which he wished to be seen by the wider world. <Source : Christie's>

  Renoir painted several self portraits throughout has career as an artist, and famous works in this genre include Self Portrait in a White Hat and several works that are simply called Self Portrait. Photographs of Renoir do exist, indeed, he lived in an era of intense experimentation with the still relatively new photographic medium. However, Renoir's self portraits convey something that the relatively stiff and formal photos that are generally available to us cannot: the warmth and vibrancy of his inner life. <Source : TheHistoryOfArt.org>

  Conrad Felixmuller is one of the leading figures in what is sometimes called the 'second generation' of Expressionists whose work coalesced around the revolutionary period in Germany following the First World War. Together with his much-celebrated portraits of daily life in the mining district of the Ruhrgebiet in the early 1920s, it is Felixmüller's portraits of himself and his family from this same period that constitute his best-known and most important body of work.  Representing a counterbalance to the powerful and yet depressing scenes of hardship and depravation found in his Ruhr pictures, Felixmüller's portraits of his family and the idyll of his home-life were intended to provide a positive alternative: one that proclaimed the simple value and harmony of his own progressive proletarian lifestyle. <Source : Christie's>