In Jan van Eyck’s famous Arnolfini Portrait (1494) the painter’s own image appears in miniature form in a convex mirror behind the couple’s heads, which seems to imply that I, Jan van Eyck, really was there to witness this betrothal, and you, the viewer, are now seeing just what I saw. Clara Peeters (born Antwerp, 1589) specialised in precise still‐life paintings in which a tiny, distorted self‐portrait would appear on reflective surfaces up to six times.
Frances Borzello draws attention to this curious device in a chapter on “The Seventeenth Century” in this fascinating and sometimes unsettling survey, which ranges from a twelfth century illuminator of manuscripts called Claricia to Alison Watt (born Greenock, 1965). Among the scholarly material at the back is a 12‐page section of artists’ biographies. The quality of the reproductions is of Thames and Hudson standard, and I was just able to make out Peeters’s multiple self‐portraits in her Still‐Life with Flowers and Gilt Cups (1612). In an extraordinary Vanitas Self‐Portrait (c.1610) a soap bubble floats beside Peeters’s head, simultaneously alluding to “the rounded breasts of the young artist” and symbolising “the fragility of life, youth, pleasures and beauty”.
Towards the end of the book Dr Borzello suggests that the rise of “performance” and “body” art has now blurred any distinction between self‐portraiture and “the art of ideas”. A number of themes that have preoccupied twentieth‐century women artists would be familiar to their predecessors of the last few centuries ‐ “illness, age, children, the family, professionalism” ‐ while the way such themes are treated is quite different. I was struck particularly by Zinaida Serebryakova’s Self‐Portrait at the Dressing Table (1909), which shows the artist at 25 “in her underwear, chemise slipping seductively off one shoulder”; and Alice Neel’s Nude Self‐Portrait (1980), in which “the 80‐year‐old artist turns her clear eye on herself”.
