Self Portrait 2

Self-Portrait
Artist: van Dyck;
Oil painting on canvas; Size: 116.5x93.5cm; Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Precocious artist that he was, Anthony van Dyck very soon turned his attention to self portrait paintings. In fact the earliest of these to have survived (Vienna) is datable to 1614, when he was just fifteen. Over the course of his career he painted many of them, and this suggests a marked narcissism. In reality he may have been induced to produce these works simply by the great reputation he acquired with his portraiture. It was an Italian critic, Giovan Battista Bellori, who wrote in 1672 that van Dyck was the greatest portraitist since the time of Titian. Van Dyck undoubtedly knew and appreciated the work of the Venetian painter, and many pages of the sketchbook he used while in Italy are dedicated to the study of one of his portraits, the Benedetto Varchi now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. Indeed, some historians regard the Benedetto Varchi as a likely source of inspiration for the Self-Portrait in St. Petersburg. The wealth of references to Italian art also establishes a link between this canvas and a work by Raphael, a portrait of an unknown man in a cap, and allows us to date it to 1622-23.
In comparison with two similar Self-Portraits in New York (Metropolitan Museum) and Munich (Alte Pinakothek), painted a few years earlier, the one in St. Petersburg presents a softer and more elegant handling of the figure.