Self-portrait with Paintbrush and palette

Self-Portrait with Paintbrush and Palette, painted in 1910 and one of Ury's most formal self-presentations, shows the artist at fifty-two explicitly claiming his professional identity by including the tools of his trade — brush and palette — as identifying attributes. The paintbrush-and-palette self-portrait is a genre with a long European tradition, from Velázquez's Las Meninas to Courbet's The Painter's Studio: the painter shown in the act of creating, or with the instruments of creation, makes a statement about artistic identity and professional seriousness. In 1910 Ury was well-established as a significant Berlin painter but remained somewhat marginal to the dominant critical narrative: the triumvirate of Liebermann, Corinth, and Slevogt was regularly cited as the core of German Impressionism while Ury, despite his influence on all three, was treated as a peripheral figure. The self-portrait with palette and brush can be read as an assertion of professional standing and artistic identity against this continued marginalisation.

The palette in a painter's self-portrait functions both as attribute and as colour sample: Ury's palette shows the range of tones he habitually mixed, providing a kind of visual signature. He positions himself slightly turned from the viewer, the brush held ready for application — a pose that creates the illusion of the artist caught between canvases, between looking at the model (the viewer) and applying paint. The face receives the most careful attention; hands and brush are handled with slightly less definition.