Self-Portrait

Watts painted this self-portrait in 1864, a year of considerable professional activity when he was deeply engaged in both his monumental allegorical programme and a stream of portrait commissions from the British establishment. By his mid-forties, Watts had established himself as the most serious and philosophically ambitious painter in Victorian England, holding a unique position that placed him above the commercial portrait world while remaining in dialogue with it. Self-portraiture for Watts was not merely documentary but part of his broader project of psychological investigation — he turned the same searching gaze on his own face that he directed at the great figures of Victorian public life. The National Gallery's canvas shows him at what might be called his prime: confident in his methods, still full of ambition for the allegorical cycle he was building, and possessed of a face that his contemporaries consistently described as deeply thoughtful and somewhat austere. Watts painted several self-portraits throughout his long life, and this example is among the most directly confrontational in its gaze.

The oil on canvas applies Watts's mature portrait technique to the self-portrait genre: warm atmospheric background, concentrated modelling of the face, and a suppression of costume detail that prevents anything from competing with the physiognomy. The artist confronts himself with the same serious intentness he brought to his most significant sitters.