Rembrandt’s painting The Night Watchcontains a self portrait by the artist. You can see his eye and nose and cap peeking out from behind the back row. (detail)
In Van Eyke’s The Arnolfini Wedding there is a figure reflected in the mirror, which is thought to be be the artist himself.(detail)
Any other similar examples?
There are thousands of self portraits in great art. I’m not interested in them. It only counts if it’s a small detail in a larger subject.
So, portrait-bombs?
:d&r:
I remember a theory that the Mona Lisa was a self portrait although I believe that has been disproven.
Like Michaelangelo’s portrait of himself in the skin on the Sistine’s Last Judgment?
El Greco stuck himself in the background chorus of The Burial of Count Ortiz, his great masterpiece in Toledo (Spain, not Ohio).
Hitchcock frequently managed to wander through a seen in his movies, from what I hear.
The fellow on the far right of the Velázquez painting The Surrender of Breda is believed to be a self-portrait.
Goya’s “Family of the Infante Don Luis.” That’s Goya in the lower left, painting the others. I especially love the guy with the bandage on his head for the way he’s looking at us.
Is the Velasquez self-portrait in Las Meninas sneaky enough, or too obvious?
I believe that the Diego Rivera mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts include Mr. Rivera himself as one of the laborers.
It’s been alleged that Hieronymus Bosch put his self-portrait under the “table”, dead-center in Hell in the right wing of the tryptich the Garden of Earthly Delights
It does kinda resemble his self-portrait, if you allow for the difference in ages
In any event, that face is actually the head for the “tree-man” at the center, if his sketch of that entity is any indication:
One of the more bizarre (but, I think, not likely) suggestions is that Leonardo da Vinci himself was the inspiration for the Mona Lisa:
One of the sneakiest, if it really is a self-portrait, is Jan Van Eyck sneaking himself into the Arnolfini Wedding
Here’s the picture:
If you look in the center in the back there’s a convex mirror reflecting the scene. Here’s a close-up:
It’s been claimed that one of those figures is the artist. as “proof”, the writing on the wall says (in Dutch) “Jon Van Eyck was here” (seriously):
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The interesting thing is that the artist in the lower left is painting the others from a different perspective than the actual painting… as if he’s working on an entirely different painting.
Bazille’s Studio
should be mentioned.
The above from Bazille's Studio, Frederic Bazille: Analysis
Several of the people are looking at you, not the artist. It’s as though you’re the painting and they’re the audience.
Samuel F.B. Morse started out wanting to be known as a great painter (he never dreamed he’d be remembered as an inventor – not at first), and one of his bids for immortality was his Gallery of the Louvre, in which he’s right smack in the middle, instructing (or annoying) a female artist
I read about this in David McCulloch’s book the Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, and then was delightfully surprised when the piece showed up on exhibition here at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, MA recently.
Man you just blew my mind!
Wow, I did not know that. Does nobody read the OP ?
Raphael appears in “The School of Athens.”
Plato and Aristotle are at the center of the painting, surrounded by dozens of other great thinkers and historical figures of antiquity. Plato was an idealist, and is surrounded by other idealists and abstract thinkers. Aristotle was a pragmatist, so he’s surrounded by scientists and mathematicians, practical men.
Raphael includes himself in the painting… on Aristotle’s side. Apparently, he regarded his craft as a practical, technical skill, not a a high art.
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