30 Famous Self Portraits by Famous Artists, 1433–1912

A self-portrait is the one picture an artist cannot commission, delegate or flatter their way out of. It is also, almost always, a piece of argument: about what a painter is worth, what painting is for, or what the person holding the brush wants you to believe about them. The thirty below run from 1433 to 1912, roughly in order, so you can watch the argument change.

Before the list, a short guide to reading them, because self-portraits use a small, surprisingly consistent set of signals, and once you know them the pictures get considerably more interesting.

How to read a self-portrait

Nearly every painting here is doing at least two of these things at once. The table is the quickest way to spot which.

Watch: why artists paint themselves

1. Jan van Eyck: Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?), 1433

The picture usually called Man in a Red Turban, and the strongest candidate for the first independent self-portrait in Western painting. The evidence is circumstantial but persuasive: the sitter looks straight out of the frame, which a paid model would not ordinarily do, and the eyes are focused at exactly the distance a mirror would put them.

The frame carries two inscriptions in van Eyck’s hand. The lower one is the date and his signature; the upper reads Als Ich Can, “as well as I can”, a pun on his own name and a piece of false modesty so confident it functions as a boast. What makes it startling six centuries later is the refusal to soften anything. The bloodshot eye, the stubble, the deep creases around the mouth: all of it is recorded at a moment when portraiture was overwhelmingly an instrument of flattery. The red headdress does the work the artist could not do with his face. It is the most expensive thing in the picture, and it is enormous.

2. Albrecht Dürer: Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight, 1500

The most audacious painting on this list. Dürer has arranged himself in strict frontal symmetry, with long centre-parted hair and a raised hand, the composition used almost exclusively, at that date, for images of Christ.

The claim is not that he is divine. It is that creative power is a God-given faculty and the artist exercises it, which in 1500 was still an argument that needed making. The Latin inscription beside his head states that he painted himself thus, in his own colours, at the age of twenty-eight. The Latin is propriis coloribus, a phrase that reads both as “my own pigments” and as “the colours proper to me”.

Look at the fur collar and the hand. Dürer’s reputation was built on engraving, where everything is line, and here he is demonstrating that he can do in paint what nobody expected of a German printmaker: render texture so precisely that you can distinguish individual hairs. It is a self-portrait and a sales document at the same time.

3. Parmigianino: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, c. 1524

Parmigianino was about twenty-one when he painted this, and it remains one of the cleverest objects in Renaissance art. He looked into a convex barber’s mirror, then had a wooden panel turned to the same curvature so the painting would be the same shape as the thing that made it. The result is a picture that reproduces its own optics faithfully. The hand nearest the mirror swells to the size of his head; the room bends away behind him; his face, at the centre where the distortion is least, stays calm and undistorted. He does not correct any of it.

That is the whole argument. A lesser painter would have fixed the hand. Parmigianino understood that the distortion was the demonstration. Anyone can paint a face, but painting what a curved mirror actually does requires you to draw what you see rather than what you know. He took it to Rome as his calling card. It worked.

4. Titian: Self-Portrait, c. 1546–47

By the mid-1540s Titian was the most sought-after painter in Europe, and he painted himself accordingly: not at an easel, not holding a brush, but as a wealthy man in a fur-lined robe with a gold chain across his chest.

The chain matters. Chains of that kind were given by rulers as marks of favour, and Charles V had made Titian a Count Palatine. Wearing one in a self-portrait is a statement that the painter has been received at court as something other than a supplier.

The handling is the other half of the point. Up close the brushwork is loose to the edge of roughness. This is the loosened late manner that Venetian critics argued about for a century. He is demonstrating that he no longer needs to prove he can render detail. The picture is the work of a man entirely certain of his position, which is a rarer thing in self-portraiture than confidence about one’s face.

5. Sofonisba Anguissola: Self-Portrait at the Easel, c. 1556

Anguissola was the first woman artist to achieve a genuinely international reputation, and this picture is a carefully constructed argument for taking her seriously.

Everything in it is chosen. The dress is plain and dark with a modest white collar, nothing that could be read as vanity. The work on the easel is a devotional subject, the most respectable thing she could be shown painting. Her brush is already touching the panel. She meets your eye without any of the coquetry that contemporary male painters routinely applied to female sitters.

She had to build that case. Women were barred from studying anatomy from the nude, which meant they were effectively barred from history painting, the genre that carried prestige. Anguissola’s answer was to become so good at portraiture that Philip II of Spain brought her to his court. Note that she is the earliest artist in this list to show herself actually at work. Leyster and Gentileschi follow within a century, and Rembrandt does the same in old age.

6. Caravaggio: Young Sick Bacchus, c. 1593–94

Caravaggio painted this shortly after arriving in Rome, broke and recovering from an illness that had put him in hospital. It is usually taken as a self-portrait in the guise of Bacchus, the god of wine, though the Galleria Borghese, which owns it, notes the identification is not settled and the model may be his companion Mario Minniti. The joke is bitter. Bacchus should be flushed and abundant; this one is grey-lipped, sallow, with dirty fingernails and a sickly greenish cast to the skin. The god of intoxication looks like someone at the worst point of a hangover, and possibly of a fever.

It is also a demonstration piece. The still life on the ledge, with its grapes, peaches and already-curling leaves, is painted with a precision that announced a new kind of naturalism to Rome. Caravaggio’s argument throughout his career was that painting should be made from the specific bodies and objects in front of you rather than from ideal types. Using his own sick face for a god is the most direct possible statement of that position.

7. Peter Paul Rubens: Self-Portrait, 1623

Rubens ran the largest and most commercially successful studio in Europe, and he was also a working diplomat who carried out missions for the Spanish crown. This self-portrait is dressed for the second job.

There is no palette, no brush, no easel and no studio. The broad black hat and dark coat are the clothes of a gentleman of standing, and the composition is the sober three-quarter view used for men of affairs. Nothing in the picture announces the profession at all. There is no chain of office, no insignia and no tool. The only evidence of what he does for a living is the quality of the paint.

Compare it with Anguissola nearly seventy years earlier, who needed the easel to establish that she was a serious painter. Rubens has the opposite problem: everyone knows he is a painter, and what he wants shown is that he is more than one. Every artist in this list is negotiating the same question of status, and the direction they push depends entirely on what they already have.

8. Judith Leyster: Self-Portrait, c. 1630

Leyster was one of very few women admitted to the Haarlem painters’ guild, and this was probably her membership piece, the work submitted to demonstrate competence.

If so, it is doing a great deal at once. She shows herself mid-turn, as though interrupted, with an arm slung casually over the chair back: a relaxed, sociable pose that no woman had used in a professional self-portrait before. She is smiling and speaking, or about to. And the canvas on the easel is a merry fiddler, which proves she can handle the lively genre scenes that sold well in Haarlem. The dress is the one deliberate fiction. Nobody painted in a collar that size, which would have been ruined in minutes. She has dressed for the portrait rather than for the studio, which tells you the picture is an advertisement for a business rather than a record of a working day. For two centuries afterwards her paintings were misattributed to Frans Hals, and her signature was in at least one case painted over with his.

9. Anthony van Dyck: Self-Portrait with a Sunflower, c. 1633

Painted soon after van Dyck became principal painter to Charles I, and constructed almost entirely out of symbols.

The gold chain he lifts towards you is the one the king gave him. The sunflower is the conventional emblem of a subject turning towards their monarch as the flower turns towards the sun. He gestures at one and displays the other, and looks out at you to make sure you have noticed both.

It is worth being clear that the sunflower reading is the standard interpretation rather than something van Dyck wrote down, and art historians have proposed others, including the sunflower as an emblem of painting itself, or of the artist’s own fame. What is not in doubt is the tone. This is a courtier’s picture: fluid, glamorous, and entirely comfortable with being looked at. Van Dyck’s portraits of the Stuart court set the template for English aristocratic portraiture for the next two hundred years, and the manner starts here, applied to himself.

10. Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, c. 1638–39

This is the cleverest structural move in the whole list, and only a woman could have made it. The standard handbook of allegory used by seventeenth-century painters described Painting as a female figure with dishevelled hair, a gold chain with a mask pendant, and a garment of shifting colours. Gentileschi has every attribute. But a male artist could only ever paint that figure as a model; she can be both the allegory and the working painter simultaneously, because she happens to be a woman who paints.

So the picture collapses the two into one body. Her arm is thrown up mid-stroke, foreshortened hard towards you, and she is looking not at you but at the canvas, too busy to acknowledge the viewer, which is itself the point. It is a picture about labour that is also a picture about theory, and it argues for her standing more effectively than any inscription could. She was the first woman admitted to the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence.

11. Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas, 1656

Not a self-portrait in the ordinary sense, and the most argued-about painting in this list. Velázquez is in it, standing at a huge canvas on the left, brush in hand, looking out at us, but he has placed himself inside a scene that is mostly about somebody else.

The mechanism is the mirror on the back wall, which shows the king and queen. Whether they are standing where we are standing, or are reflections of the canvas Velázquez is painting, has never been settled, and the picture works because it does not resolve. Either way, the artist has arranged things so that the royal couple appear as a small dim reflection while he himself is life-size and looking straight at us. He was invested into the Order of Santiago in November 1659, three years after the picture is dated, and the traditional account holds that the red cross on his chest was added afterwards, though recent conservation work has questioned that and no version commands agreement. It is the same claim Titian made with a gold chain, pressed further: the painter as courtier, standing in the royal apartments, at work.

12. Rembrandt van Rijn: Self-Portrait with Two Circles, 1665–69

Rembrandt made close to eighty self-portraits across forty years, counting paintings, etchings and drawings together, around forty in paint alone, which is still more than any artist before him. This is among the last. He is around sixty and has been through bankruptcy, having outlived his partner Hendrickje.

The face is painted with brutal directness, catching the swollen nose, the sagging jaw and the small tired eyes. Everything else is left deliberately unfinished. The hands holding the palette and brushes are barely indicated. He has finished only what he wants you to look at.

The two arcs behind him have never been explained. The most common suggestion is a reference to the story of Giotto proving his skill by drawing a perfect circle freehand; others read them as a map, or as a compositional device and nothing more. Nobody knows, and it is worth saying so rather than picking one. What is certain is the tone: this is a man who has lost almost everything, standing in his working clothes with the tools of his trade, and declining to look away.

13. Rosalba Carriera: Self-Portrait as “Winter”, 1730–31

Carriera did more than anyone to establish pastel as a serious medium rather than a sketching material, and she was one of the most in-demand portraitists in Europe, elected to Rome’s Accademia di San Luca and sought out by visiting aristocrats on the Grand Tour.

The medium is the argument here. Pastel was regarded as decorative and slight; Carriera used it to produce portraits with the presence of oil paintings, and made a very good living doing so. The soft granular surface she gets from it, particularly in skin and hair, is something oil cannot easily imitate. She shows herself here as Winter, swathed in white fur, the season personified. It was a fashionable conceit and also a way of turning a self-portrait into a subject picture that a collector would buy. The conceit lets her do two things at once: sit for her own likeness, and deliver a saleable allegory to a market that wanted the Four Seasons on a wall. She was in her mid to late fifties when she made this one, at the height of a career that took her to Paris and Vienna on commission. Carriera went blind in her final years, which for a pastellist meant the end of everything.

14. Jean-Siméon Chardin: Self-Portrait with an Eyeshade, 1775

Chardin spent his career painting quiet domestic still lifes and was in his mid-seventies here, with failing eyesight and an intolerance for oil paint that had forced him to switch to pastel.

So he painted exactly what was in the mirror: an old man in working clothes, a knotted headscarf, a blue eyeshade to cut the glare, spectacles pushed down his nose. There is no palette, no fine coat, no classical prop of any kind. Almost every other artist in the first half of this list is arguing about status; Chardin, in 1775, appears simply to have stopped caring, decades before anyone else does. The result is one of the most likeable faces in art. The eyebrows are up, the mouth is set in something between amusement and enquiry, and the whole thing is built from loose hatched strokes of chalk that resolve into a person only when you step back. Diderot, who reviewed the Salons, thought Chardin’s late pastels extraordinary. They are the closest the eighteenth century gets to a self-portrait with no agenda at all.

15. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, after 1782

Vigée Le Brun was Marie Antoinette’s favourite portraitist, and this picture was her response to seeing a Rubens portrait of a woman in Antwerp. She said in her memoirs that its effect came from being painted in daylight, and set out to reproduce it.

The result is a self-portrait that looks like an outdoor snapshot two generations before that was a possible thing to want. She is lit by open sky rather than studio light, and the hat throws a soft shadow across the upper face while the light bounces back up from her white fichu. She holds her palette and brushes, so the professional claim is made, but everything else is warmth and ease.

It made her famous and she repeated the formula for clients repeatedly. It is also worth reading against Anguissola more than two centuries earlier: both women use the palette to establish seriousness, but Vigée Le Brun is confident enough to be charming at the same time. She painted around thirty self-portraits and fled France during the Revolution, working across Europe for twelve years.

16. Angelica Kauffman: Self-Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting, 1794

Kauffman was a founding member of Britain’s Royal Academy, one of only two women among the founders, and the last until the twentieth century. She was also a trained singer who had to choose between the two careers. She has staged that choice as a classical allegory, borrowing the composition of Hercules at the crossroads between Virtue and Vice. Music, in red, holds her hand and looks up at her pleadingly. Painting, in blue and gold, holds a palette and points away towards a classical temple high on a distant hill, the harder road.

Kauffman, in white at the centre, leans away from Music and gestures towards Painting, while her face stays turned back to Music, with what the collection that owns the picture describes as regret and resolve together. It is a genuinely elegant piece of design: the decision already taken, the reluctance still showing. She is also, characteristically, using a heavyweight classical framework to describe a personal choice, which was exactly her strategy for being taken seriously as a history painter in a field that did not expect women in it.

17. Jacques-Louis David: Self-Portrait, 1794

Painted in prison. David had been the artistic director of the French Revolution and a deputy who voted for the king’s execution; when Robespierre fell in July 1794, David was arrested.

Knowing that changes what you see. The gaze is wide and slightly wild, the hair is disordered, and the palette and brushes are held rather than used, the picture of a man asserting an identity that might be the only thing left to him. He carried a facial tumour from a fencing injury in his youth that affected his speech for the rest of his life, and he does not smooth the resulting asymmetry away here.

The style is worth noting too. David built Neoclassicism on hard outlines, controlled surfaces and moral clarity. Here the handling is comparatively loose and the mood is anything but controlled. He survived, was released, and later became Napoleon’s painter. Few self-portraits are so precisely dated to a personal catastrophe.

18. Francisco Goya: Self-Portrait, 1815

Goya was around sixty-nine, completely deaf since an illness in 1793, and had lived through the Peninsular War and the atrocities he recorded in The Disasters of War.

The picture strips away the office. There is no hat, no palette, no setting and no insignia of any kind, just a head and shoulders in a plain dark coat over a loose white shirt, lit hard from one side and surfacing out of a dark, modulated brown ground. He had been First Court Painter to the Spanish crown for decades, and nothing here says so.

The expression is hard to name, which is why the painting holds. It is not defiant and not defeated; the mouth is set, the eyes are steady and slightly hooded, and there is a suggestion of exhaustion around them. Set it beside the courtly self-portraits earlier in this list and you can see the whole tradition changing direction. The question has stopped being what am I worth and become what have I seen.

19. Gustave Courbet: The Desperate Man, c. 1843–45

Courbet was in his mid-twenties and had recently arrived in Paris, and this is a young artist’s picture in the most literal sense: enormous, theatrical feeling delivered with complete technical control.

The composition is what makes it. He is pushed right up against the front of the picture, closer than any other face in this list, with his elbows out of frame and his hands driven into his hair. The eyes are wide open and fixed directly on you. There is no room, no context and no escape route for the viewer. Whether the emotion is sincere is a fair question and not really the point. Courbet painted a whole series of self-portraits in different Romantic roles in these years: the wounded man, the man with a pipe, the cellist. He was experimenting with what a self-portrait could be made to do, and he kept this one with him for the rest of his life, including into exile in Switzerland. It has since become one of the most reproduced images in nineteenth-century painting.

20. Paul Cézanne: Self-Portrait, 1878–80

Cézanne painted himself around thirty times, and the interest is never psychological. He is using his own head as a still-life object, something that will hold still indefinitely while he works out a problem.

The problem is how to build a solid head out of paint without drawing an outline around it. The strokes are broad and softly blended, and the same weight of attention falls on the skull, the beard, the coat and the background. Nothing is subordinated, and the edges between them are worked rather than drawn. The result is a head that feels constructed rather than described.

He also refuses to make himself sympathetic. The dome of the bald head is exaggerated, the expression is closed, and the gaze is turned slightly aside. Set against Courbet’s melodrama thirty-five years earlier, the contrast is total: Courbet wants you to feel something about him, Cézanne wants you to look at how the picture is made. Both Picasso and Matisse later described him as the starting point for everything they did.

21. Mary Cassatt: Self-Portrait, c. 1880

Cassatt was the only American invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists, and this is the least finished picture in this list, deliberately so. Large areas of the paper are simply left bare. The dress is a handful of loaded blue-green strokes and the background is a few warm ochre marks on bare paper, while the bonnet, one of only two passages carried to a finish, is built up in saturated ochre and brown. Beyond the bonnet only the face is carried through, and even that is economical. It looks like something caught in twenty minutes, which was precisely the Impressionist ambition: the sketch treated as a finished statement rather than a step towards one.

The pose is worth noticing. She is seated, turned slightly away, in a bonnet and day dress: the same informal domestic setting she used for her paintings of women and children. She has not reached for a palette or any other badge of profession. After four centuries of artists arguing their status through props, an Impressionist could simply assume it, and Cassatt, who exhibited alongside Degas and Pissarro, had the standing to do so.

22. Berthe Morisot: Self-Portrait, 1885

Morisot exhibited in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions, more than Monet did, and this self-portrait shows the loose broken handling that critics of the time treated as evidence of incompetence.

The face is built from separate strokes that do not blend, so it holds together at a distance and dissolves up close. The dress is barely more than a scatter of ochre and floral marks. What is striking is the expression, which is direct, unsmiling and a little wary, nothing like the gracious sociability she was expected to project as a bourgeois Parisian woman.

She painted very few self-portraits, and it is easy to see this one as a private working document rather than a statement. That is part of its value: after a long run of pictures in this list built to be seen by patrons and academies, here is another that looks like an artist checking something for herself, though the palette is still there at her waist. Her work was systematically undervalued for a century afterwards, largely because she painted domestic subjects.

23. Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear, 1889

Painted in January 1889, weeks after van Gogh cut off part of his own ear following the collapse of his attempt to live and work with Gauguin in Arles.

What is remarkable is how composed it is. He has put on a coat and a fur-lined cap, positioned himself in the studio, and painted the aftermath with complete deliberation. Behind him are the two things that mattered: a canvas on an easel, and a Japanese woodblock print of the kind he collected and copied. The message is that the work continues.

One thing this picture is routinely wrong about in reproduction. The bandage sits on the left-hand side of the canvas as you look at it, so it covers the figure’s apparent right ear. But he painted from a mirror, which reverses everything, so the ear he actually injured was his left one. He painted at least two self-portraits with the bandage in this period, and he chose to paint himself calm rather than distressed in both. The most famous mental-health image in Western art is, in fact, a picture of someone getting back to work.

24. Paul Gauguin: Self-Portrait with Halo and Snake, 1889

Painted on a cupboard door at an inn in Brittany, and one of the earliest paintings anywhere to abandon modelled space entirely in favour of flat blocks of colour.

The symbolism is laid on thickly and knowingly. A halo hovers above his head. Apples hang beside him. A snake is threaded between his fingers. He is simultaneously saint and tempter, and the sardonic set of the mouth makes clear he does not expect to be believed about either.

This is the moment self-portraiture becomes fully self-aware. Van Dyck used a sunflower earnestly, two and a half centuries earlier; Gauguin uses a halo as a joke that is also a genuine claim about the artist as a figure apart. The flat red and yellow grounds owe a direct debt to the Japanese prints then arriving in Europe, and they anticipate a great deal of twentieth-century painting. He left for Tahiti two years later.

25. Henri Rousseau: Myself: Portrait-Landscape, 1890

Rousseau was a Paris toll collector who taught himself to paint and exhibited to open ridicule for most of his life. He also invented a genre for this picture and gave it a name: portrait-paysage, portrait-landscape.

The scale is the whole joke, and it is not clear how much of it is intentional. He towers over the foreground, head and shoulders above the bridge behind him, palette in hand, black-coated and beret-wearing, entirely unbothered. Behind him is a compressed inventory of modern Paris: the Eiffel Tower, newly built; a hot-air balloon; a ship dressed overall in signal flags for the 1889 Universal Exposition. The perspective is wrong, the figure is stiff, and the picture is completely compelling. Picasso bought a Rousseau for five francs from a junk dealer and threw a banquet in his honour. What the avant-garde saw was a painter who had arrived at flatness and frontality by simply not knowing the rules they were struggling to unlearn.

26. Edvard Munch: Self-Portrait with Cigarette, 1895

Munch painted this two years after The Scream, and it uses the same method: the environment does the emotional work rather than the expression. His face is lit and reasonably solid. Everything below it is not. The suit dissolves into vertical smears, the hand holding the cigarette is barely resolved, and the whole lower half of the figure fades into the same blue-violet haze that could be smoke or could be the room dematerialising. He appears to be standing in the process of disappearing.

The cigarette is doing real work. In 1895 it read as decadent and modern, the mark of the urban bohemian, and its smoke supplies the visual excuse for the dissolution. The painting caused an argument when it was shown in Norway, partly on grounds of technique and partly because a young man presenting himself this way was taken as a provocation. It is the clearest example in this list of the shift the decoder table describes: the interior state has become the entire subject.

27. Lovis Corinth: Self-Portrait with Skeleton, 1896

Corinth painted himself almost every year on his birthday, which produced one of the most complete records of a life in art, and this early example sets the terms.

He stands in his Munich studio in shirtsleeves next to a hanging anatomical skeleton, a wide window and the city stretching behind them both. The skeleton is a studio tool, an ordinary piece of equipment for a painter trained in academic anatomy. It is also, unavoidably, a memento mori, the traditional reminder of death, and Corinth is placing himself deliberately alongside it, at around thirty-eight, in good health.

The doubling is the point: the same object is both a professional instrument and a symbol, and the picture lets both readings stand. Corinth suffered a severe stroke in 1911 and taught himself to paint again with a partly disabled hand; the self-portraits he made afterwards are rougher, stranger and among his best-regarded work. This one is the confident version of the same annual habit.

28. James Ensor: Self-Portrait with Masks, 1899

Ensor’s family kept a souvenir shop in Ostend that sold carnival masks, and he spent his career painting them. Here he is packed into a crowd of them, the one living face in a wall of grinning cardboard.

The picture inverts the usual logic of the mask. Normally the mask conceals and the face beneath is true; Ensor’s masks are vivid, varied and full of character, while his own face, pale and moustached, in a hat with a red feather borrowed from a Rubens self-portrait, is the least expressive thing in the frame. Society is the carnival, and the artist is the one item in it not performing. He had reason to feel besieged. His work was rejected repeatedly, including by the avant-garde group he had helped found, and the masks in his paintings are frequently read as critics, dealers and the public. The colour is extraordinary, hot pinks and acid greens crammed edge to edge with no space to rest, and it prefigures Expressionism by a decade.

29. Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Self-Portrait, 1910

Renoir was sixty-nine and severely disabled by rheumatoid arthritis. By this stage his hands were deformed, he painted from a wheelchair, and brushes were sometimes placed into his grip by an assistant.

None of that is in the picture, and the omission is the interesting part. The palette is warm, all reds, creams and soft ochres, and the handling is fluid and generous. He gives himself a straw hat and a white scarf, the clothes of a man comfortable in the south of France, and paints his own worn face with the same affection he applied to his models for fifty years.

Renoir once said, in substance, that there were enough unpleasant things in the world without painting more of them, and this self-portrait is that position held to the end. Set against Corinth’s skeleton or Munch’s dissolving smoke, it is a deliberate refusal of the modern mode. Whether you read it as courage or evasion is genuinely open, and the picture is better for the ambiguity.

30. Egon Schiele: Self-Portrait with Physalis, 1912

Schiele was twenty-two, and this is the most reproduced of the roughly one hundred self-portraits he made in a life that ended at twenty-eight. The construction is severe. The head is tilted at an uncomfortable angle, one shoulder is hitched up, the body is cropped hard, and the background is left almost entirely blank so there is nothing to soften the silhouette. The only other element is a stem of physalis, the Chinese lantern plant, whose orange pods and dry leaves echo the angles of his own frame.

He was intensely aware of how he looked and used his own body as material throughout his career, in poses that were closer to contortion than portraiture. What keeps this one from being merely mannered is the drawing: the line describing the jaw and the raised shoulder is exact, and the colour is used sparingly enough that the orange reads almost as punctuation. Schiele died in the 1918 influenza pandemic, three days after his wife.

Why this list stops in 1912

You may have noticed some famous names missing. Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Picasso’s late self-portraits, Andy Warhol’s, Francis Bacon’s, M.C. Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere. All of them belong in any honest account of the subject, and none of them appears above.

The reason is copyright. In most of Europe a work enters the public domain seventy years after the artist’s death, and in Mexico it takes a hundred, which is why Kahlo, who died in 1954, will not be freely reproducible until the 2050s. In the United States the rules for works of this period turn on publication rather than the artist’s lifespan, so the exact date varies work by work; the practical effect for a page like this one is the same. Every image on this page is public domain and we can show it to you legally. The twentieth-century pictures are not, and reproducing them without a licence is exactly the kind of thing that quietly happens on a lot of art websites.

So the list runs from 1433 to 1912 and stops. If you want to see the modern ones, the museums that hold them put them online with a licence: Kahlo’s hummingbird portrait is at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, and Bacon’s and Warhol’s works are documented by their respective foundations. It is worth seeing them properly rather than as a thumbnail.

Watch: ten famous self-portraits

What the whole sequence shows

Read in order, the thirty pictures track one argument being won and then abandoned.

From van Eyck to van Dyck, roughly 1433 to 1633, nearly every artist here is making a case for their own standing. The palette, the fine coat, the gold chain and the direct gaze are all instruments in that case, and the case was necessary because painting was widely classed as a manual trade. Anguissola, Leyster and Gentileschi had to make it twice over.

The argument outlives its own victory. Long after painting stopped needing to be defended, the props stay in the pictures: Carriera reaches for a classical conceit in 1730, Vigée Le Brun holds up her palette in the 1780s, Kauffman stages the whole case as allegory in 1794, David grips brushes he is plainly not using, and Morisot and Rousseau still have palettes in hand in the 1880s and 90s. What changes is that they stop being an argument and become furniture. The real break is Courbet in the 1840s, and it is a change of subject rather than of props: the pictures stop asking to be respected and start reporting on a state of mind. Goya had already got there, in 1815, with nothing in his hands at all. Munch dissolves, Ensor hides in a crowd, Schiele contorts. The surest sign the case had been won is not that the palettes disappear, since Morisot and Rousseau are still holding them, but that it stops mattering either way. Cassatt leaves hers out of the picture around 1880 and Morisot keeps hers in five years later, and neither choice is making a case for anything.

If you want to see where this leads next, our guide to the most famous paintings of all time covers the wider canon, and the most famous sad paintings follows the emotional thread specifically. For the same status arguments made in three dimensions, see the most famous statues in the world.

Image credits

All thirty images are in the public domain and were sourced from Wikimedia Commons, with the licence confirmed on each file record and every image inspected before use. No attribution is legally required for public-domain works; the source is recorded here as a matter of practice.