(What’s
this? A mason’s head and his trowel just above a wall.) This self-portrait
is on the low end of the scale.. When the British soprano Susan Chilcott died at the age of 40 two years ago, she was at the peak of her career and on the point, many believed, of greatness. Though the vibrant and attractive singer would have been mourned regardless of her profession, the sense of lost potential brought added poignancy to the death So friends and family decided that the music should live on. They began fund-raising to establish scholarships for other emerging talents.
Last night, the first 10 winners of the Susan Chilcott Scholarship were announced at a ceremony in London.

He devised picture riddles, such as the
horizontal line with a semicircle and a triangle resting on it. Born in Bologna, active mostly in Rome, he worked in styles high and low. He
made comic pictures of bean-eating peasants, and elevated frescos of
mythological panoramas, in which he revived the High Renaissance manner. He
invented the genre of Ideal Landscape, and made some of the earliest
experiments in graphic caricature. In short, it’s presented as an object, an
artefact, a plain, inanimate, portable thing.

This puts a strain on the gaze of the man with the beard. One way, here’s a
face that looks at us with the usual vivid eye-contact effect.

Another way,
here’s an area of paint, put on a canvas, that’s stretched over wood, that’s
propped on an easel, all as dead as a doornail. This image before us
oscillates between communion and objectification Focus on the eyes, and
there’s the look. Focus on the whole scene, and there’s a piece of work in a
workshop.

Self-Portrait on an Easel is a picture that displays the twofold nature of the
image, the lifeless medium that can conjure up the living human presence. And even the artist’s own face seems a little unsure of its status. It peers
out with a tentative expression, betraying a doubt about whether it’s really
there for us, whether its gaze can ever get through.

THE ARTIST

Annibale Caracci (1560-1609) was the most versatile visual artist of his time. And as in many
portraits and self-portraits, it has a face that catches and holds your eye,
that directly communes with the viewer.

Yes ” but on the other hand, Carracci does all he can to baffle that sense of
communion. The portrait may be centred, but it’s small and isolated,
something you could imagine picking up and moving around.

It sits on its
easel, unfinished, a painting in progress, the colours still on the palette
for next time. It lies at a slant, not completely facing us, turned away
slightly, with the nailed side of the stretcher showing, and the rough white
unpainted edge of the canvas. He’s much more firmly painted than the
animals, and the vague shape (a statue?) at the back window is hardly
realised at all. There’s just this portrait, this self-portrait; it’s the
only thing really, and it sits in the centre of the picture.

Unlike many pictures with a picture-within-
the-picture, there aren’t any ‘real’ people in the rest of the scene The
only person here is this man on the painted canvas. He’s unquestionably the
most real inhabitant of the picture. It shows a dark and
undefined studio space, with some kind of window at the back In it stands a
tripod easel. A dog and cat skulk dimly around its feet, an artist’s palette
hangs from it, and propped on its ledge there’s a painted canvas, a portrait
of the artist, a sensitive man with a beard.