Executed in 1992, Jenny Saville’s striking Self-Portrait (Head Study), formed of gestural brushstrokes of deep reds and subtle variations of ivory, sienna and beige bears all the hallmarks of the artist’s most important early works. The present work was executed a year after the artist won a scholarship to study for a term at the University of Cincinnati. Her experiences there would prove a real turning point, as aside from attending art classes, she also had access to a whole curriculum of theoretical studies. The courses she attended were a revelation; it was the first t.mes Saville came to understand the relative absence of female expression in art history and suddenly, this awareness led her to question her own experiences as an art student. In an early interview published in The Independent, Saville recalled her thoughts at the t.mes : “I'd always wondered why there had been no women artists in history. I found there had been – but not reported. I realised I'd been affected by male ideas, going through a male-dominated art college” (Jenny Saville in conversation with Hunter Davies in: Hunter Davies, ‘This is Jenny, and This is Her Plan’, The Independent, 1 March 1994, p. 21). Upon her return to the studio Saville would start to paint the works that catapulted her into the forefront of the painting landscape; her series of nude figures from the 1990s are her most widely recognised. Self-Portrait (Head Study) was executed in conjunction and in preparation for works such as Propped and Branded and attests to the artist’s innate talent and dexterity with oil paint.

With her head rolling backwards towards a shallow, stark background, Saville’s stare engages the viewer, oscillating between a confrontation of the viewer and an apathetic response to the viewer’s gaze. There is an undeniable intimacy and intensity to Saville’s tightly cropped composition, subtly permeated by the artist’s own vulnerability as she lays back, reclining against a dark, shadowy backdrop. Highlighting the figure’s rich, fleshy chin, neck and chest, Saville’s resolutely unflattering angle denies conventional expectations of the depiction of women. This lowered viewpoint and subsequently foreshortened figure has become a hallmark of Saville’s work and features in her most significant and revered portraits such as Propped, Branded and Plan.

Despite its romantic palette of soft beige, peach pinks and crimson reds, Saville’s Self-Portrait (Head Study) presents an uncompromising image of the artist, renegotiating both the tradition of the self-portrait and the expectations of the female subject. With her piercing red lips and rosy cheeks, Saville’s portrait is defiantly feminine, subverting and distorting the insistently male tradition of the self-portrait to carve out an entirely new artistic convention. Here, Saville positions herself within a lineage of art history’s most celebrated masters. Indeed, her composition is reminiscent of Rembrandt’s quiet, shadowy portraits, her handling of flesh calls to mind Ruben’s dramatic, baroque nudes, her frenetic brushstroke directly informed by Willem de Kooning’s Women and her painterly detail comparable to the work of Lucian Freud. Yet, Saville’s Self-Portrait (Head Study) stands as a refutation of canonised representations of female beauty and a celebration of the imperfections of the human form. As writer Michelle Meagher states, Saville’s subjects are “not the refined and evenly proportioned nudes of classical art… [but rather] bodies that are not at all beautiful in any conventional sense” (Michelle Meagher, ‘Jenny Saville and a Feminist Aesthetics of Disgust’, Hypatia, Vol. 18, No. 4, p. 23). In this important early self-portrait, Saville radically positions herself as both the observer and the observed, a theme that has in subsequent decades remained central throughout subsequent decades of her practice.