Painted at age 21, "Self-Portrait" is one of John Wilson’s earliest and most compelling oil paintings. Though Wilson was still a student at the SMFA in 1943, he was already making his mark in the art world. Museums, including MOMA and the Smith College Museum of Art were acquiring his work, and Wilson was winning major awards. In 1943, he received the John Hope Purchase Award at the 2nd Annual Exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Prints by Negro Artists, organized in Atlanta by artist Hale Woodruff. He received a similar prize the following year.

"Self Portrait" attests to the painterly sensibility that Wilson’s peers admired. The monumental sitter stares outward with a piercing, if solemn intensity. Closely cropped, and seated in a sparsely painted, almost abstract interior (note the wonderful wavy line that forms the background window), the figure is defined by an unusual volume and weight that presages Wilson’s sculpture, the work for which he is best known. Indeed, there are passages in this painting where Wilson applied paint almost as if it were plaster or clay. Note the heavy impasto around the buttons of the lovely open collared shirt where the whites are visibly worked with a palette knife or the right side of the rolling collar, where Wilson swiped away a layer of white to reveal the mottled red under layer of the sweater vest. Perhaps this portrait shows us what it looks like when a painter starts to think like a sculptor, shaping rather than applying his material.

The monumentality of the "Self Portrait" reflects the influence of the great Mexican muralists, whose work Wilson, like so many artists of the 1940s greatly admired. The painting recalls the portraiture of David Siqueiros, who also worked close to the picture plane as in the MFA’s Self Portrait (1937) or the 1931 painting Zapata (Hirshorn collection). In his student years, Wilson also traveled to Dartmouth to see Jose Clemente Orozco's ambitious 1934 mural “The Epic of American Civilization,” and there are clear traces of that iconic image here. (Later, in 1950, Wilson was awarded a grant to study at Mexico City’s national art school, La Esmerelda and encountered the work of the great muralists firsthand.) Others have noted the influence of art history’s greatest self-portraitist: Rembrandt, whose work Wilson learned about at the MFA and in the classroom of his teacher Karl Zerbe.

Wilson’s career as a painter was short-lived. By the 1960s, he had given up his brushes to focus on drawing, printmaking and public sculpture. "Self-Portrait" is a fine example of an all too short chapter.

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