Self-Portrait VI with Flower 1909

Hans Thoma made this self-portrait, one of many, with some kind of dry media – maybe charcoal or graphite. Look how he’s built the image out of tiny, almost frantic marks. It’s like he’s trying to catch his own likeness before it disappears. The texture is everything here, right? You can practically feel the grain of the paper and the scratch of the medium, especially around the eyes, the beard, and in the background. And that flower he’s holding? It’s like a little emblem of fragility, a reminder of time passing. If you look closely, you can see how the marks change direction and density, creating a sense of light and shadow that’s almost sculptural. You see, Thoma is in conversation with people like Durer, but he also anticipates artists like Lucian Freud, who used drawing to explore the complexities of the human face. Art, like life, is all about seeing and feeling, isn’t it?