Self-Portrait

Painted rapidly with thick impasto and dramatic light and dark tones, the canvas suggests a swagger and confidence that no doubt aided his remarkable rise to official painter to Charles I.

Little is known of Dobson’s early life, aside from a record of his baptism in London in 1611. He became apprenticed to William Peake, a painter and print seller, and may also have trained under the German artist Francis Cleyn, a portrait painter and muralist who worked in England from 1625. In Cleyn’s studio he would have been exposed to the influence of European art that his work displays. By 1641 he was so well regarded that he was able to replace Anthony van Dyck as court painter when he died.

After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Dobson moved with the court to Oxford, where he created most of his work, including portraits of Charles I, his sons and notable royalists. Among his best-known pictures is his portrait Charles II, when Prince of Wales (c1642), now in the Scottish National Gallery. After the King’s defeat in 1646, Dobson returned to London, where he died, aged 35.

Self-Portrait is a companion work to Portrait of the Artist’s Wife (c1635-40), which shows Dobson’s second wife, Judith Sanders, whom he married in 1637. For nearly 300 years the two portraits hung side by side in Howsham Hall in Yorkshire, until they were sold in 1948. Tate acquired Portrait of the Artist’s Wife in 1992, and they have been reunited since then. Self-Portrait is expected to be displayed on a rotating basis between the two acquiring museums starting at Tate Britain from November 2025.