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'Self Portrait in Studio', British School
Ref: 4261
Self-portraits are often interesting, a chance for the painter to reflect on themselves and their craft and they often tell us much about attitudes to painting and life of the period.
Here the themes are characteristically Romantic, i.e. of the time. Two life-styles are contrasted, that of the well-fed burgher in the painting within the painting, with son and loving wife then that of the artist himself, solitary, pale, slightly distrained in appearance, burning the midnight oil, as he toils away at his dull commission.
In these works you often see statuary in the background to indicate a classical training and discipline. Here though is a more mysterious "bundle", human-like mis-shaped and covered in swaddling bands? A shroud? Something dead? Not quite dead? Or yet to be born? It's almost sinister and brings a Gothic element to the night-time scene, a typically period sense of the artist as an obsessive, a quester in the darkness, seeking out mysteries that lie beyond the edge of the Reason.
This is an oil on canvas, in frame, various old labels to reverse give clues as to the artist and provenance, an old gallery sales card reads, '19th century English School Portrait of an Artist at Work'.
British early to mid-19th cent.
H: 53cm (20.9in)
W: 48cm (18.9in)
D: 4.5cm (1.8in)
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