Self-portrait

Mondrian's self-portrait from around 1900, now at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., shows the artist as a young man still finding his painterly identity. At this date Mondrian was in his late twenties and working within the tradition of the Hague School, absorbed in naturalistic landscape and figure painting before the radical formal transformations of his mature career. The self-portrait belongs to a European tradition of artists recording their own likeness as both professional statement and private self-examination, and it provides a rare figurative record of Mondrian before his commitment to pure abstraction made representational portraiture conceptually incompatible with his practice.

The self-portrait employs a conventional three-quarter pose and tonal approach characteristic of late-nineteenth-century Dutch academic painting. The handling is careful and deliberate, with attention to the modeling of the face and the contrast between the figure and the dark background.