Self-Portrait, turned slightly to the left

Käthe Kollwitz

ca. 1893 · Pen and different shades of gray-black ink · Drawings and Prints

Throughout her career as a draftsman and printmaker, Kollwitz depicted herself in a series of arresting self-portraits. In this early work, the artist economically rendered her own stark features with horizontal strokes of pen and ink. Kollwitz indicated areas of shadow and light by loading her pen with darker and lighter solutions of black ink. Visible in the upper right corner of the sheet are the small pen marks she made to test out the ink before she applied it to the face. Her dramatic use of shadow and ambiguous expression recall Rembrandt’s etched self-portraits of the seventeenth-century, while prefiguring the bold, melancholy, twentieth-century prints for which Kollwitz is best known.

Artist

Käthe Kollwitz

Date

ca. 1893

Medium

Pen and different shades of gray-black ink

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2006