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Lot Essay
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
While still a young man when he painted Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet) in 1963, Fernando Botero was already enjoying rising success in his newly adopted home of New York. The Museum of Modern Art had recently purchased his Mona Lisa, Age 12 thus affirming his position within the esteemed institution’s hallowed halls of art history. Just a few years earlier in 1957, Botero had hit upon his own distinct style of painting which would come to define his work for the next six decades and bring him widespread international recognition. That year, while painting a still-life of a mandolin, Botero placed a disproportionately small sound hole in the body of the instrument, which immediately imbued the object with a quality of exaggerated mass and monumentality. This mandolin still-life thereafter became the catalyst for Botero’s lifelong investigation of volume and form.
Even in early works like Mona Lisa, Age 12 or Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet), Botero’s signature playful use of proportion is evident, yet what differentiates these paintings from the 1950s and 60s is his pronounced brushstrokes. Unlike the smooth precise finishes of his later works, these early paintings have a more roughhewn quality that clearly reveal the hand of the artist. In Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet), Botero revels in the application of paint in the thick strokes of brown in the oversized kettle and in the generous layers of orange and red in the hefty apples. This enormous still life dwarfs the diminutive Botero who stands in front of his miniature easel, which holds a facsimile of French Realist painter Gustave Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate from 1871. We see that the looming subject before Botero replicates Courbet’s work, transforming this seemingly playful painting into an homage to the nineteenth-century artist. Much of Botero’s oeuvre is indeed rife with references to the Old Masters. Beginning in 1952, after winning a competition in his native Colombia which afforded him prize money to travel to Europe, Botero immersed himself in the great Spanish, Italian and French masters, first studying the work of Velázquez and Goya at the Prado while living in Madrid and then later the frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello in Florence and eventually the great canvases of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Courbet and others in Paris. These artists often make direct appearances in Botero’s oeuvre, as in the case of his Portrait of Courbet or in the present work which fancifully replicates a still-life by the nineteenth-century artist painted while he was in prison at the end of his life. Indeed it is not surprising that Botero looked to Courbet—the Realist artist par excellence—for inspiration, given the Colombian master’s own claim to the title of “post-abstract realist.”
Fig. 1 Fernando Botero, Mona Lisa, Age 12, 1959, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fig. 2 Gustave Courbet, Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate, 1871-1872, The National Gallery, London.
Fig. 3 Fernando Botero, Portrait of Courbet, 1998.
While still a young man when he painted Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet) in 1963, Fernando Botero was already enjoying rising success in his newly adopted home of New York. The Museum of Modern Art had recently purchased his Mona Lisa, Age 12 thus affirming his position within the esteemed institution’s hallowed halls of art history. Just a few years earlier in 1957, Botero had hit upon his own distinct style of painting which would come to define his work for the next six decades and bring him widespread international recognition. That year, while painting a still-life of a mandolin, Botero placed a disproportionately small sound hole in the body of the instrument, which immediately imbued the object with a quality of exaggerated mass and monumentality. This mandolin still-life thereafter became the catalyst for Botero’s lifelong investigation of volume and form.
Even in early works like Mona Lisa, Age 12 or Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet), Botero’s signature playful use of proportion is evident, yet what differentiates these paintings from the 1950s and 60s is his pronounced brushstrokes. Unlike the smooth precise finishes of his later works, these early paintings have a more roughhewn quality that clearly reveal the hand of the artist. In Self-Portrait with Still Life (After Courbet), Botero revels in the application of paint in the thick strokes of brown in the oversized kettle and in the generous layers of orange and red in the hefty apples. This enormous still life dwarfs the diminutive Botero who stands in front of his miniature easel, which holds a facsimile of French Realist painter Gustave Courbet’s Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate from 1871. We see that the looming subject before Botero replicates Courbet’s work, transforming this seemingly playful painting into an homage to the nineteenth-century artist. Much of Botero’s oeuvre is indeed rife with references to the Old Masters. Beginning in 1952, after winning a competition in his native Colombia which afforded him prize money to travel to Europe, Botero immersed himself in the great Spanish, Italian and French masters, first studying the work of Velázquez and Goya at the Prado while living in Madrid and then later the frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello in Florence and eventually the great canvases of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Courbet and others in Paris. These artists often make direct appearances in Botero’s oeuvre, as in the case of his Portrait of Courbet or in the present work which fancifully replicates a still-life by the nineteenth-century artist painted while he was in prison at the end of his life. Indeed it is not surprising that Botero looked to Courbet—the Realist artist par excellence—for inspiration, given the Colombian master’s own claim to the title of “post-abstract realist.”
Fig. 1 Fernando Botero, Mona Lisa, Age 12, 1959, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Fig. 2 Gustave Courbet, Still Life with Apples and a Pomegranate, 1871-1872, The National Gallery, London.
Fig. 3 Fernando Botero, Portrait of Courbet, 1998.