These self-portraits by European artists - Heemskerck from the 16th century and von Marées and Courbet from the 19th century - feature realism.

Which painter depicted himself:

1. With Franz von Lenbach

Hans von Marées

Hans von Marées (1837-1887) was a German portraitist who often depicted male nudes, sometimes in tranquil bucolic settings or in scenes from classical mythology. Von Marées' early work consisted mainly of equestrian and military subjects, but he later preferred these mythological subjects.

Both von Lenbach and von Marées were leaders of a late 19th-century style of painting that emerged in Germany in and around the Munich Art Academy. The striking features of these Munich School paintings are accuracy and realism. The genres popular with Munich School artists are landscape, history painting, and portraits.

Von Marées’ self-portrait with fellow artist von Lenbach is currently housed at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, a museum that focuses on 19th-century European art.

2. With a black dog

Gustave Courbet

Jean-Désiré-Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) dominated the 19th-century French movement toward realism. Art critics and the public of his time were accustomed to idealistic pictures that made life look better than it was; Courbet, against much opposition, portrayed everyday places and people truthfully and realistically.

Courbet painted a variety of subjects, among them portraits, female nudes, landscapes, and scenes from nature. His famous series of seascapes with changing storm clouds billowing overhead had a great influence on the Impressionists, pushing, as they did, into near-abstraction. Though intent on capturing realism, his work was never ordinary or predictable and he, for example, would never have used the same techniques or the same sense of scale in a seascape as he would in a landscape.

His self portrait with dog, known as “Courbet au Chien Noir” (1842), portrays Courbet as a young man of twenty-three in a landscape in his native province near the grotto of Plaisir-Fontaine, sitting with his pet spaniel, a present from one of his friends.

“Courbet with a Black Dog” is currently housed at the Petit Palais in Paris to which it was recently given as a gift from Mlle Juliette Courbet, the sister of the artist.

3. With a view of the Colosseum in Rome

Heemskerck

Marten Jacobszoon Heemskerk van Veen or Marten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) was a Dutch portrait and religious painter of the 16th century. He traveled from Holland to Rome and sketched all the art he could absorb, including ancient architecture, medieval monuments, and frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo.

Classical ruins dominate much of Heemskerck's work and he is famous for his paintings of the Seven Wonders of the World. He seems to have had a particular fondness for the Colosseum, the great amphitheater in Rome completed by the Emperor Titus in 80 AD. In his notebook drawings, he depicted the Colosseum as the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World, though he presented it, as he does here, in his “Self Portrait with the Colosseum in the Background” (1553), in its ruined state.

Heemskerck’s “Self Portrait with the Colosseum in the Background” is currently housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the art and antiquities museum of the University of Cambridge located on Trumpington Street in Cambridge, England.

Source:

Bailey, Colin J. “The Art Quiz Book: 2000+ Questions on Painters and Paintings.” Station Press: Scotland, 1995.