Connections/Artists by Themselves

My name is Carrie Rebora Barratt. I'm associate director for collections and admininstration, and some of my favorite works of art in the Museum are self-portraits of artists.

There just seems to me something incredibly spontaneous and intense about an artist trying to convey his own image.

I like to think that they're looking at me. They're actually looking at themselves. In order to paint a self-portrait, one would have to be looking into a mirror, and so the

direct engagement is so immediate, I find even more immediate than if any of the artists that I know had been painting someone else.

I just think it's endlessly fascinating to know what artists look like because they seem like our friends.

They are the creators of the works of art that surround us. And many artists

as we know, are absolutely captivated with their own image.

One of the tell-tale signs of a Gilbert Stuart portrait is that even his prettiest women end up looking a little bit like him.

Because it is the face that you know the best. We don't know what they were thinking that day or what the purpose was.

And is that an accurate representation? The Gilbert Stuart is a portrait of melancholy. I know exactly when it was painted, I know why it was painted, I know he was bankrupt and going through a divorce. And so the picture of him that looks like he hasn't slept in days is conveyed in that image.

In contemporary art, it's one thing to look at an artist's work, it's another, for instance, if you go to an opening and you get to meet them.

And sometimes that enhances the pleasure of looking at their work and sometimes it sort of ruins the whole experience.

With traditional portrait practice, Sir Joshua Reynolds used to say, you must not bother the sitter for than six, seven, eight sittings at the very, very most.

And so what that meant was that most clients for a portrait would sit for an artist within a polite amount of time, then they would continue to work on the face after they left. By nature

self-portraits are created with the person in the room. Even if the artist puts down the mirror, they always have access to that face again, especially in the eras that would have required that any kind of work would be commissioned.

Portrait of Joseph Wood, which as an aside just absolutely makes me swoon, is so incredibly, timelessly handsome, but it's a sales pitch. It is not only this incredibly romantic image that conveys maybe his best side, but also a work that he would have had out in his miniature studio.

In the museum, a number of the self-portraits of women are women in studio positions, so rather than just a head on a canvas, conveying that kind of intense, possibly spiritual aspect of an artist

one finds more women at work as a sort of evidence of professional accomplishment. Most of us

spend time trying to be with others all the time, in a community, with friends, finding something to do, but to find that space where you are actually not really doing anything

except for looking at yourself and trying to record an aspect of yourself in an impermeable medium, fairly profound.

We look to these self-portraits for what they must convey about how an artist wanted to present himself. And that artist could take endless license with what he's wearing, what he's holding

you know how he conveys himself, and so to that extent there is a bit of salesmanship, a bit of, a bit of lying perhaps going on, but self-portraits are authentic because the convey how the artist would have wanted

to project themselves.