Interpretive Resource

Fredric Bazille was in his mid-twenties when he executed this startlingly mature and accomplished self-portrait, and it remains today one of the finest painted in France during the 1860's. Although the artist neither signed nor dated it, the portrait is highly finished and offers close stylistic affinities with other paintings made by Bazille in 1865. It was not sold or exhibited during the painter’s short lifetime and remained in the collection of his family until the early 1960's.

The young Bazille represented himself against a subtly modulated, monochrome background and included as props only his palette and brushes. Thus, he portrayed himself frankly and simply as a painter, but without the picturesque clutter of the painter’s studio. We confront him, not his environment. The device of isolating the portrait figure on an undifferentiated ground was common in French painting throughout the nineteenth century, but it gained new prominence in the 1860's in the painting of Edouard Manet, whose reductive palette, stark modeling, and bold compositions became highly influential. Bazille owed a definite debt to Manet, but was certainly not a slavish imitator. Indeed, Self-Portrait has few of the sharp, almost violent juxtapositions of light against dark or the heavy impasto that characterizes the contemporary work of Manet. Rather, it is carefully descriptive, and even timid, in its manipulation of the paint. Interestingly, many of the nineteenth-century artists who made important self-portraits — Courbet, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh —represented themselves not as artists per se, but as individuals. We can tell nothing of Degas’s profession from his etched self-portrait, and most of the self-portraits by the other artists include no palettes, brushes, or paints. In fact, these modern artists seem to have been anxious to avoid showing themselves as makers of art. Thus, they saw themselves not as the gods of Neoclassical art or as the heroes of Romantic art, but simply as men and women. Bazille’s Self-Portrait is compelling because of the directness of the pose and the subject’s ambiguous psychological relationship to the viewer. While we cannot see them, the easel and canvas must be located immediately in front of Bazille and to our left. He has turned presumably to look at himself in a mirror, and the effect of his turned head is arresting. It seems less that Bazille is painting himself than that he is painting us. He thereby transformed the self-portrait — often an introspective, self-absorbed kind of painting — into a study of the relationship between the artist and the viewer or, in a larger sense, the artist and the world around him. In the end, the painting becomes a work about the inevitable distance between the observer and the observed.