Augustus John is best known as a portraitist and alongside his paintings of his family and well known contemporaries, he created numerous self-portraits. This self-portrait was created in 1920 when John’s fame as a leading portrait painter of his time was in the ascendant. In this small-scale etching, measuring 17.5 x 12.8 cm, John makes direct reference to Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) in his pose and slightly parted lips.

Portraiture was an important part of Alfred Wolmark's work and many important cultural figures sat for him, including Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham and Alduous Huxley. In contrast to these formal portraits, his self-portraits gave him room to experiment with different ways of painting including the looser, more impressionist style seen in the present work.

The self-portrait was a recurring theme throughout Jean Cooke's career, who wrote: ‘Sometimes I paint self-portraits to show off, sometimes to hide away in solitude, sometimes to say ‘Here I am’, sometimes to say ‘I want to be alone’. But always there is a searching for the unknown, the previously unperceived.’ She has signed this work ‘Jean Bratby’ and was married to the painter John Bratby (1928-1992) from 1953 until the marriage was dissolved in the late 1970s.

Adrian Wiszniekwski often depicts young men in his work, many of which are self-portraits. In this work on paper Wiszniekwski has used a variety of media to create the self-portrait including charcoal and watercolour. He has depicted himself in two poses: in both he appears younger than he was when the work was created.

Shani Rhys James has written about her series of ‘Heads’: ‘I find by simply doing the Heads I am focusing on the head like a landscape, It is a type of meditation. Each time I do a head it is different. I look at my head in parts, with a small hand mirror, so in a sense I deconstruct the head … I am interested in the way the paint becomes through marks and accidents, something other than a portrait. I am not interested in a likeness, or reality as such. The painting has to exist on two levels, as something abstract, and as something emotional. It is not explicit. They just become what they become, I respond to the moment, changing them many times in the process of the painting’.

This print was created to coincide with Rose Wylie's retrospective exhibition Quack Quack at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in 2017-2018. Wylie often combines text with images in her work, and the RW on the left confirms that this is a self-portrait. The closely cropped composition is inspired, like many of Wylie's paintings, by cinematography.

Tracey Emin’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, using her life events and states of emotion as inspiration for her works. Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through self-exploration.