Self-portrait

Around 1900 Mondrian was 28 and earning his living in Amsterdam in ways that had little to do with painting like this. He copied pictures in museums for buyers who wanted cheap versions, and he made drawings of specimens for scientific use. He had gone in for the Prix de Rome in 1898 and tried again in 1901, without success either time. The self-portrait belongs to those years, dark and tightly worked, the face lit from one side the way Dutch painters had been lighting faces for three centuries. The Phillips Collection in Washington bought it in 1958, 14 years after he died in New York.