Self-Portrait

Skip to main content
Self-Portrait
Self-Portrait
Self-Portrait
TitleSelf-Portrait
Artist (1920 - 2011)
Date1969
MediumTempera on gessoed panel
DimensionsUnframed: 24 × 19 1/2 in. Framed: 26 × 21 1/2 × 1 3/8 in.
SignedSigned at lower right: "Tooker 1969".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, March 3, 1969
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1706-P
Label TextAfter graduating from Harvard University with a degree in English Literature, George Tooker enrolled at the Art Students League, New York where he studied with painter Reginald Marsh. Marsh encouraged Tooker to work in the painstakingly laborious technique of egg tempera in which pigment is mixed with an egg yolk binder and applied to a gessoed panel. By the mid-1940s Tooker was exhibiting his work professionally and he soon became closely allied with two other representational painters with a similar sensibility, Paul Cadmus and Jared French. As a college student Tooker was particularly taken with Italian Renaissance painting of the quattrocento that he saw at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard. Florentine Renaissance painting has continued to influence his work, and served as the inspiration for this self portrait, one of only a handful by the artist. Like many Renaissance self-portraits, Tooker depicts himself at work with brush in hand.
Collections
  • Artist Portrait Highlights from the Collection
Voice II
George Clair Tooker
1972
Self-Portrait
Newell Convers Wyeth
1940
Self-Portrait
Andrew Newell Wyeth
1945
Saint Valentine
Maxfield Parrish
1904
Evening in the Sierras
Peter Hurd
1938/1939
Self-Portrait
Hilde Band Kayn
n.d.
Singing Blind
Zoltan Leslie Sepeshy
1938
Photography by Matthew Dodd
Joseph Santore
1990
Self-Portrait
Thomas Hart Benton
1963
Self-Portrait
Jacob Lawrence
1977
Study of George
Robert Remsen Vickrey
n.d.