Self-Portrait

Raphael Soyer's late Self Portrait presents the balding, aged artist in an unflinchingly honest take on the traditional bust portrait, with the subject turned slightly away from the picture plane and light illuminating his head from the right against a plain dark background. Soyer peers out at the viewer from under arched eyebrows, but his abstracted gaze and somber expression hint at a more powerful inner vision—one that sees into the murkiness of his own future rather than out at the world around him.

A self-portrait was one of the very first etchings Soyer made, in 1917, when he was a teenaged art student. Over the course of his career, he made many intense, close-up self-portraits in painting and various drawing and printmaking media. At age seventy-five, Soyer worked with his longtime collaborator, master intaglio printer Emiliano Sorini, to realize this poignant self-image that conveys the artist's honest scrutiny of his aged visage and recognition of his own mortality. As he explained in his later years: "I've painted and drawn myself countless times because, frankly, I am an introvert and introverts are involved with themselves. Usually, I draw and paint myself when I am alone, moody and unshaven, recalling mentally self-portraits by favorite masters. When I was young and painted a self portrait, I tried to imagine what I would look like old. Now when I paint myself I remember my youthful self-portraits and what I looked like then and meditate on what time does to all of us."

    Comparison of the original etched plate (TF 2004.3.1), the print's first state (TF 2004.4), and this example of the second state of this self-portrait yields insights into Soyer's graphic process. Between the first and second states, he strengthened the outlines of the head and the contrasts of light and dark between the sparsely etched area at the bottom of the print and the dark tones of the background surrounding the head achieved by dense cross-hatching. Soyer's use of line and variety of strokes results in an image of this seemingly frail, wispy haired old man, with a small, set mouth and a pointed chin. To indicate the collar, sleeves, and front of his simple white shirt, he strategically placed a few lines. Soyer's dark upraised eyebrows above his unflinching, deep-set eyes compel the viewer to confront him as a fellow human being.