There is a wry and unexpectedly beautiful photograph by Helen Chadwick that shows her hands gently cradling a human brain. It is titled Self-Portrait. This cannot be the artist’s own brain, of course, this disembodied object with its intricate, walnut-like folds; but are we our brains in any case? Here she is, head in hands, asking the old questions – who, or what, or where exactly am I? It is Chadwick’s droll retort to the impossibility of ever summing oneself up in a self-portrait.
But still artists keep on doing it, keep trying to find a way to make their inner and outer selves coincide in some form or image. They have been doing it, quite possibly, since those earliest artists left the shape of their hands on the cave walls at Lascaux. Over time there must have been billions of self-portraits, given that even the least of us have tried it, and what connects them all is this aim for the truth, for getting something across of one’s self.
In the tremendous Facing the World at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, more than a hundred artists give solo performances of every conceivable variety across five centuries, from Rembrandt in a brown study to Ai Weiwei mugging in his Instagram selfies. There are paintings from Watteau and Wilkie to Munch and Matisse; there are photographs dating back to Hill and Adamson in the 1840s and forwards to Warhol and Mapplethorpe in self-revealing disguises. There are videos, filmed performances and even a startling ceramic sculpture in which the 19th-century French artist Jean-Joseph Carriès shows himself as a Spanish soldier, but with emaciated cheeks and anxious eyes beneath his proud visor.
For although self-portraiture is often held to be a narcissistic act, conspicuous cases of vanity are comparatively rare. There are two in this show and they are both hilarious. Gustave Courbet shows himself in handsome profile with an adoring girlfriend, fingers rapturously entwined, in The Happy Lovers. Anselm Feuerbach lowers his head and gazes straight out at us from beneath film-star brows in a shameless come-on. Even his stepmother thought Feuerbach “vain beyond anything I have hitherto seen”.
But we don’t go to self-portraits for objective likeness or documentary fact. In some cases there may not even be a likeness at all. The German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is a tiny, sharp-nosed puppet, green and ochre, daubing away hopefully at a yellow canvas. His compatriot Fritz Klemm is nothing more than a chalk outline on a thickly encrusted painting table. And the Scottish painter Stanley Cursiter, whose studio was a few doors away from the gallery where his self-portrait now hangs, shows himself only from behind.
But a face is not what’s at stake, otherwise we would settle for a photograph or a portrait of Van Gogh, for instance, rather than one of his deathless self-portraits. What distinguishes this kind of art is a greater and more inward truth than mere physical appearance: it is the truth of how these men and women saw – and wanted us to see – themselves.
So the Belgian artist James Ensor shows himself to be as beady-eyed as his pug: two black dogs in the depressive gloom. Vincenzo Campi stuffs his face with ricotta, a bon vivant in 16th-century Cremona. And Edvard Munch depicts himself alone with his good friend the bottle – together for ever in the cafe. In the background, two black-clad waiters hover like a double-headed demon, and the bottle exerts its will over Munch; it is more upright than the artist.
Self-portraits raise the question of their own existence – why were they painted? Franz Xaver Winterhalter and his brother Hermann, portrayers of the crowned heads of Europe, seal their successful relationship with fraternal smiles. Robert Henderson Blyth paints himself in the first world war trenches, a corpse behind him, to show himself still alive.
And the Scottish painter Cecile Walton appears half-naked after the birth of her child, as a nurse washes her exhausted body. Walton holds the baby in a kind of daze, as if wondering at this strange new being in the world – and how radically new the self-portrait must have looked too; it was painted in 1920.
Every image, no matter how faltering, is a surefire fascination. Sometimes the thrill is simply in the appearance – how handsome Sir David Wilkie was, how snub-nosed Henri Fantin-Latour, how sickly poor Watteau. Sometimes it is in the professional promotion. A still life specialist such as Abraham van Beyeren shows himself as a tiny reflection in a grand silver jug: here is what he could do for you, the potential customer, as well as what he made of himself.
And how curiously circular is the history of self-portraiture. The first painting in this show is a magnificent Rembrandt from the 1650s – illuminated, as it seems, by the light of his own mind. It is one of the greatest of all self-portraits, a hundred nuances carried in that grave face. The idea of identity as a matter of many selves, or fragmented selves – the subject of several 20th-century self-portraits in this show – goes back hundreds of years.
And Rembrandt, the Shakespeare of self-portrayers, also depicted himself over and again. A whole suite of his etchings can be seen in Edinburgh. The serial self-portrayers in this show – Munch, Kirchner, Lovis Corinth, the YBAs – all have their supreme forebear.
Perhaps the most touching self-portrait here is the only one ever attempted by Henry Raeburn, intensely successful portraitist of the Scottish Enlightenment. The face is hesitant, reluctant, weak; the head-in-hand pose looks about to collapse; everything is disconnected and awkward. Yet even here there is a truth. For Raeburn never wanted to depict himself in the first place; he only undertook this enormous challenge – this attempt to produce a definitive image of oneself – because he misunderstood the entrance requirements for the Royal Academy in London. Raeburn, who could get anyone’s portrait down in a matter of hours, could not manage his own.
The Scottish National Gallery also has a jewel of a show in Inspiring Impressionism, a celebration of the French painter Charles-François Daubigny (1817-78), plein-air pioneer, modest soul, major inspiration and friend to the impressionists. Daubigny’s landscapes are quite conservative at first, but he grows wilder with the years: rockpools burning yellow in the sunset, details subservient to impressions, skies radiating in flurried brushstrokes.
His influence is apparent throughout this exhibition. Monet emulates his stormy skies and sonorous sunsets over the Normandy coast. Pissarro is clearly inspired by the blossomy haze of his orchards. Van Gogh paints Daubigny’s verdant garden at Auvers three times in homage, and borrows his unusual double-square format.
But inside this lush impressionist show is a sharp-focus portrait of an overlooked painter. What held Daubigny back, it seems, was not his vision or his proto-impressionist style, but that he cleaved to conventional colours. His paintings tend to be earth-brown compared to his younger followers, and he is much less interested in optics and light. Still, the landscapes in this show are at the very cusp between tradition and experiment, and they show him to be one of art’s beautifully free spirits.
