Arcadópolis
Self-Portrait
Saturnino Herrán, 1915
What you see
Only the head appears, seen from the front and filling most of the sheet, set against a blue-green rectangle that serves as background. The artist looks at himself with slightly furrowed brows, his eyes fixed on us. He has short hair, large ears, a small mustache and parted lips. There is no neck or shoulders: the chin ends in a dark line, and the rest is white paper.
Everything is made of short, grainy strokes, like crayon or colored pencil, that give the skin a vibrant texture. The face carries yellow and pink tones with greenish shadows, the same green as the background. Notice how the light leaves the left half of the face brighter.
About Saturnino Herrán
Saturnino Herrán was born in Aguascalientes in 1887 and trained at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, studying drawing with the Catalan painter Antonio Fabrés and colour with Germán Gedovius. He turned scenes of everyday Mexican life into symbolic images of identity, and his painting “The Offering” (1913) is a classic example of Mexican modernism. He died in 1918, aged only 31, while working on “Our Gods”, a triptych commissioned for the Palace of Fine Arts, and his work became a model for the muralists of the following decades.
More by Saturnino Herrán
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