Self-portrait of the artist

Signed and dated lower right: Hoppe / 86

Oil on canvas

54. x 45.5 cm. (21 ½ x 17 ¾. in.)

Staring assertively out at the viewer, Bruno Hoppe depicts himself as a confident and dandyish young man with close-cropped hair and a fashionable pointed beard and moustache. Emerging from a darkened background, Hoppe paints himself with a reduced earthy palette, enlivened by the starched white collar and a flash of pink in the shoulder. A symphony of browns and ochres, the portrait is technically accomplished, combining looser, spontaneous brushwork in the body with a tighter finish in the face, drawing our eyes immediately to this focal point. Dating from 1886, the year he graduated from the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, we see Hoppe as a self-assured artist about to embark on his career.

That the image is a self-portrait can be confirmed by a near-contemporary photograph of the young artist, in which all the physiognomic features match exactly with the painting. Indeed these features are seen again, albeit with less hair, in a later self-portrait of 1925 now in the Ystad Konstmusuem.

Fig. 1, Photograph of Bruno Hoppe, c. 1886

Bror ‘Bruno’ Christian Hoppe was born in Ystad on the southern tip of Sweden in 1859, the son of a well-known watchmaker, Carl Johann Hoppe. He studied in the Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm between 1881 and 1886, continuing his studies in Copenhagen in 1888-1889 and finally Paris in 1889-90. During the 1890s he ran a well-respected and popular female art school in Malmö. He was comfortable across different subject matter, from landscape and cityscapes to genre scene and still life, though it was as a portraitist that Hoppe had most success.

Fig. 2, Bruno Hoppe, Self-portrait, 1925, oil on canvas, 94. x 74 cm,

Ystad Konstmuseum