Self-portrait in a cracked mirror
Richard Hamilton British
Not on view
While working with the printer Aldo Crommelynck in Paris on an illustration for James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Hamilton found a small cracked mirror in the studio and made this self-portrait as part of an exploration of soft-ground etching. Peering above his reading glasses at his long, bearded face, he recorded the fractured image with an etching needle directly onto a metal plate covered with soft wax. The delicacy of the line and the presence of the artist’s fingerprints in the lower section indicate the receptiveness of the wax.