Over her lifetime Schjerfbeck painted and drew around forty self-portraits, about half of which were made in the last years few years of her life. From her earliest poised naturalistic likenesses of herself, her expressive observations executed in her abstracted, pared-down style, to the primal egg-shaped heads with a few smudged marks that marked out her final self-representations, these works chart her emotional life, her ageing process, and her physical decline. The present work, painted in 1942 while Schjerfbeck was staying at the Luontola Sanatorium in Nummela, 27 miles northwest of Helsinki, is among the most haunting self-portraits of the twentieth century. It is as though she is staring mortality in the face, her expression filled with existential angst. Painted at the height of the Second World War, news of the death camps was leaking out and in the public conscience, adding an extra poignancy and meaning to the painting.

Scherfbeck’s acute consciousness of mortality in these late works actually mirrors a preoccupation she carried with her throughout her life and that is latent in her very earliest history paintings, including Wounded Warrior in the Snow and The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin.

For almost half a century after it was painted, until it appeared at auction in 1988, this self-portrait remained in the possession of the family of its first owner, Einar Reuter. Reuter, a forester, artist, and writer, and an admirer of Schjerfbeck’s paintings, first met her in 1915. The two began a lifelong friendship and correspondence, and Schjerfbeck portrayed him several times, most famously in the sensual portrait The Sailor of 1918. Schjerfbeck had hopes for a closer relationship, which were dashed when Reuter, to her disappointment, became engaged to a Swede in 1919. Their intense friendship continued, however, and they kept up their correspondence. More than half of Schjerfbeck’s two thousand surviving letters are addressed to Reuter, who, to coincide with her first solo show organized by Gösta Stenman in 1917, published his biography of her, written under the pseudonym H. Ahtela.