Selbstbildnis

Klinger painted this Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait) in 1885 when he was twenty-nine and already established through his graphic cycles Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove (1881) and Eve and the Future (1880). The self-portrait was a central exercise for late nineteenth-century artists grappling with questions of artistic identity—Courbet, Böcklin, and many others used the genre to project a particular image of artistic character. Klinger's self-portrait would communicate his self-conception as a serious artist in the German Romantic and academic tradition, with the psychological intensity his prints had already made famous. The Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe holds this, placing it in a major south German museum collection with comprehensive German painting holdings that document the full range of German art from Caspar David Friedrich onward to the Wilhelmine era in which Klinger worked.

Oil on canvas with the controlled, searching handling that self-portraits demand: the painter is simultaneously model and observer, requiring sustained attention to facial modeling. Klinger's academic training in Brussels and Berlin provided the technical foundation for assured portraiture.