Self-Portrait with Waroquy

1889

Oil on canvas, 92.7 × 72.4 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A young painter studies himself while a friend looms close behind him. Curator Mary Weaver Chapin pairs it with two other self-portraits from that year to introduce the group.

The scene is a mirror image, given away only by a small bottle's reflection at lower right. A quiet clue like this makes an ordinary room feel slightly dreamlike.
His journal places the sitting before his grandmother's bedroom mirror.
Look at the friend behind, with a cigarette between his lips.
The friend is painted more vaguely than the sitter, so he seems to drift back.
It came to the Met in 1955 as a gift of Alex M. Lewyt.

The painter was 23, in a high collar that could suit a clerk or a cleric. Only the palette and brushes mark him as an artist.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · CC0