Self Portrait

There is a swagger, even an arrogance, in the bearing of this man who meets our eye so directly and seems so at ease with himself. This is an undated self portrait, and going by what his contemporaries said about the artist – Jan Lievens – we shouldn’t be surprised at his self-confident air. In the 1650s, when he was painting a portrait of Sir Robert Kerr, the English ambassador, Kerr wrote a letter describing him: ‘he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the 17 Provinces [of the Low Countries].’Lievens‘ confidence isn’t just apparent in his bearing. His dress is that of a man of wealth and fashion. The padded silk gown (known as a japonse rock) was expensive and probably imported from Japan. The gown and billowing shirt, sleeves tied back with wide black ribbons, first came into fashion in the early to mid-1650s, which was also the time that gentlemen started to wear their hair long and loose, as Lievens does here. That date also fits with the style adopted by Lievens for the landscape in the background.This portrait in particular reflects how Lievens’ style, once close to that of Rembrandt, had changed after he was exposed to other influences. From 1635 to 1643 he worked with Flemish artists in Antwerp. And before that, in the early 1630s, he was in London, painting at the court of Charles I, where he met Anthony van Dyck. In fact we know that this is a self portrait in part because the face and features closely resemble a painting Van Dyck made of him in London about 1632 (now lost, but known through an engraving after it).His chosen dress is interesting in this context. In the seventeenth century self portraits were a way for artists to demonstrate their skills to potential clients, but they were also a way of claiming higher social and artistic status. Rembrandt tended to do this by posing in antique-style clothes, aligning himself with the great Italian painters of a century and more earlier. But Lievens’ experience working with the dashing Van Dyck at the English court made him far more interested in emulating the aristocracy’s latest fashions, and also providing them with a more impressive setting than, for example, the shadowy brown background favoured by Rembrandt. The landscape behind Lievens – which unusually appears to be a moonlit rather than a day-time scene – includes a long avenue suggesting the formal grounds of a country estate. The aristocracy were, after all, among his most important customers, and he needed to be able to paint them in a suitable style. But the confidence of his pose suggests that he may have considered himself their social equal too.