The Difficult Birth of the Western Self Portrait

We tend to think of self-portraiture as a perennial type of art, but in this lecture Professor Read shows the difficulties that had to be overcome before it gained the form we now recognise. He charts changes in selfhood reflected in paintings over several centuries but pays particular attention to individual paintings by Rembrandt, Max Beckmann and Cézanne. 

Emeritus Professor Richard Read is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow in Art History at the University of Western Australia where he was Professor of Art History.  He wrote the first book on the British art critic Adrian Stokes, which won a national prize, and has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, the history of art theory, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history, sensory perception and landscape painting, contemporary film, and complex images in global contexts. For many years he gave lectures on seventeenth-century…