Self-portrait in Youth, 18 April 1986

Sir Sidney Nolan RA (1917 - 1992)

RA Collection: Art

In this self-portrait, painted just days before his sixty-ninth birthday, Nolan remembers himself as a young man. Shrouded within mists of paint, his clothing and features are almost indecipherable. The sombre colour palette and mask-like features evoke the passage of time.

As a young man, Sidney Nolan worked in the marketing and design department of a hat factory in Melbourne, where he first learned to work with commercial spray paint. Later, in the 1980s, the artist created a series of abstract portraits of historical and contemporary figures he admired, returning to the methods of spray paint from his early career to reflect on his life, career, and legacy.