As long as there have been mirrors, there have been self-portraits. The practical advantages are obvious: an impoverished artist who paints herself doesn’t need to pay a model. And she’s always available.
In The Mirror and the Palette, Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits, author Jennifer Higgie also points out the psychological benefits of the self-portrait. For one thing, the artist has an outlet to express her pride in her profession, as seen in the many self-portraits that depict her at work before her easel. And self-portraits were also a promotional tool, a way of showing the world the artist’s capability. Then too, given the obstacles that women artists have historically had to overcome, when Higgie points out that “paint can be controlled in a way that other aspects of life cannot,” its appeal seems inarguable.
After twenty years of teaching courses about women artists, I am in possession of many shelves of references books, biographies, and catalogues of exhibitions by and about artists. But I still delight in coming across new tidbits of information. For instance, Renaissance women artists were forbidden from climbing on scaffolding, which prevented them from creating frescoes. Still, the prohibition makes sense when you consider the safety of dragging long skirts up ladders, not to mention the threat of accidentally revealing one’s ankles. But did you know that it was considered improper to paint a subject with an open-mouthed smile? Considering the state of dentistry through history, this may have been an aesthetic stricture, but it’s one that Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun scuttled in 18th century France.
The book is arranged roughly chronologically, but within that framework, artists are grouped thematically. In the Allegory section, for instance, we learn about Renaissance artists who represented themselves as the embodiment of an idea, such as Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portrait as an allegory of painting. In her old age, Rosalba Carriera painted herself as Winter .
I was fascinated by the Translation section, where I learned about Australian artist Margaret Preston (Higgie is an Australian author) and New Zealand artist Rita Angus, neither commonly included in surveys of women artists. Angus’s self-portrait, Rutu, refers to a Polynesian goddess (is that a halo or the sun behind her head?) The painting is a study of the pākehā, the New Zealander of European descent. Angus depicts herself with dark skin and blonde hair, surrounded by symbols of the South Seas: a fish, lush vegetation, and the sea.
It would have been delightful to read about more women we’ve heard little about, artists from countries under-represented in the history of art.
The Mirror and the Palette is an excellent choice for anyone new to women’s art history, as well as for the reader who is interested in delving deeper into sections like Naked, about artists who want to be so fully seen that they paint nude self-portraits, or Solitude, which considers the reasons an artist might decide against marriage and family. At the very least, after reading this book, you’ll pause the next time you see a woman’s self-portrait and possibly hear the artist declare, “Look at me. I exist. I have something to say.”