Self-portrait

This 1892 self-portrait, now in the Kiev National Picture Gallery, was painted in the last years of Nikolai Ge's life, when he was producing the most radical works of his career — the late Passion series that shocked and fascinated in equal measure. A self-portrait at this moment is a statement of self-examination: the aged artist who had started his career as a celebrated academic painter and now stood outside every convention, backed only by Tolstoy's approval and his own uncompromising conscience. Ge had spent years in voluntary exile on his Ukrainian farm, living the Tolstoyan ideals of simplicity and labour. The self-portrait is likely an honest, unpretentious examination of an old face — without vanity, without the social performance that characterises formal portraits, and possibly with the same willingness to look at suffering and decay that animates his Golgotha and Crucifixion paintings.

Oil on canvas, the self-portrait is likely painted with the same directness and relative roughness that characterise Ge's late style. The face would be examined with the dispassion of a skilled observer who has given up the desire to flatter. The palette is probably warm and subdued, the brushwork free of the academic smoothness of his earlier portraits, consistent with the deliberate anti-aesthetic stance of his final phase.