Self-Portrait, Yawning

A gentleman in a velvet dressing-gown yawns enormously, his mouth open, his eyes squeezed shut and one hand raised to his face — a man caught in the middle of a yawn, painted with such frankness that the picture borders on caricature. Joseph Ducreux, the French portraitist who served the court of Louis XVI at Versailles, made the work about 1783, as part of the series of expressive self-portraits in which he set out to rival the comic physiognomies of the old masters. Ducreux was among the most fashionable portrait painters of his generation, and this unflattering self-portrait is the best known of the group, its theatrical gesture anticipating the psychological comedy that would flourish in the art of the next century. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.