Self-Portrait with Allegories

David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl was the painter who dominated Swedish art through the second half of the seventeenth century, and this self-portrait is his most personal statement of what that art was for. He shows himself seated at the easel, attended by two allegorical women: Painting, who carries a palette, and Invention, who stands for the thought behind the work. The Latin motto on the paper she holds names the highest purpose the age allowed the artist — to make the sovereign’s glory immortal — and the canvas accordingly treats the studio itself as the subject, casting the painter as the peer of the court’s poets and scholars. Painted in 1691, it belongs to the years when Ehrenstrahl, a German who had settled in Sweden as a young man, was decorating Drottningholm and serving as court painter to Charles XI. The Nationalmuseum’s exhibition text presents the picture as the key to his self-understanding. The painting is held in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.