Self-Portrait as an Old Man

portrait

In this self-portrait the painter records on his face every indication of old age with the greatest precision and inventories them with what contemporaries called "pore painting" naturalism. In his earlier self-portrait the face was the mirror of personality, of the character and of the soul. In this later one it is the mirror of the decline of the body.

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About the Artist

Christian Seybold

1690 – 1768

German painter, active in Austria. He went to Vienna in his youth and, apparently self-taught, became a portrait-painter. His earliest known work, surviving only in an engraving (1728) by Andreas Schmutzer and Josef Schmutzer, is a portrait of Graf Johann Adam Questenberg in the formal Baroque style. Subsequently, under the influence of Balthasar Denner, he turned to a more intimate style of representation, mainly in simple half-length or head-and-shoulders portraits. He was influenced by Rembrandt both directly through the study of his works and also through Jan Kupecky who worked in Vienna for a time.

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