Self Portrait

Self Portrait from 1800 by John Hoppner shows the artist in his maturity, when he stood alongside Thomas Lawrence as one of the two leading portrait painters in England. Hoppner's self-portrait reveals the direct, unpretentious character that contemporaries noted in both his person and his painting. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays fluent, confident brushwork in the tradition of Reynolds, with a warm atmospheric palette and a gift for flattering likenesses that retained individual character.

The self-portrait is rendered with characteristic honesty and fluid technique, the artist applying to his own features the same atmospheric breadth and warm tonality that defined his commissioned work.