Some works of art do not merely present an image; they open a conversation with us across time. Ellen Thesleff’s Self-Portrait (1894–95), drawn in pencil and sepia ink, is such a work. What captivates me is not only her likeness but the way her face emerges—a luminous presence rising out of a storm of restless lines. This is what I admire most: the tension between dissolution and definition, between chaos and stillness, where the gaze holds firm while the world around it dissolves. It is precisely this effect I strive for in my own practice with pencil and charcoal.
At first glance, the portrait seems simple. A head, softly modeled, surrounded by dark hatching. Yet the more one lingers, the more one sees how deliberate the balance is. The lines around her are turbulent, layered, almost chaotic, and yet they intensify the quiet solidity of her face. She does not conceal the process; she allows hesitation, scribbles, and shadow to remain visible. This willingness to leave the drawing unresolved gives it vitality, as if we are watching her identity form before our eyes.
This sense of emergence was central to Thesleff’s wider style. Born in Helsinki in 1869, she began her career during the height of European Symbolism, when artists sought to capture inner life rather than outward appearances. Thesleff absorbed this influence, but she also resisted categories. Her work moved restlessly between Symbolism, Expressionism, and Modernism, always retaining a fiercely independent voice. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she often turned the gaze inward. Her self-portraits are not self-celebrations but meditations — attempts to grasp the instability of selfhood in a world where identities were shifting, especially for women in the arts.
The medium here is as telling as the image itself. Thesleff’s decision to work in sepia ink situates her portrait within a much older tradition. Sepia, derived historically from the cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis), has been prized since antiquity as a natural ink. Renaissance artists used it for warm-toned wash drawings, and it continued to carry connotations of memory and time. Unlike the starkness of black ink, sepia introduces softness, an undertone of warmth, as though the image is already tinged with the patina of age.
To render herself in sepia was to embrace that history of memory. We often associate sepia with the faded photographs of the past, with images softened by time’s hand. In Thesleff’s portrait, the sepia tone deepens the sense that we are seeing her both as present and as a figure suspended in history. Her face emerges not only from shadow but from the sediment of memory, as if drawn out of the sea’s depths or the archive of the past.
There is also a symbolic charge to the medium. The cuttlefish produces ink as a defense mechanism, creating a cloud to obscure itself from predators. How fitting that Thesleff should choose this substance to render her own image — a self both revealed and veiled. The sepia becomes a metaphor for identity: we are always partly visible, partly hidden, our presence revealed through the very medium of concealment. In this way, the material itself participates in the meaning of the portrait.
For me, as a fellow maker, this is instructive. Working with pencil and charcoal, I know the play of shadow and light, the intensity of black against white. But sepia suggests another register: warmth, mortality, the organic. It reminds me that materials carry their own histories, and that choosing one medium over another is never neutral. Thesleff’s sepia face does not simply depict her — it anchors her within a lineage of art history, memory, and nature itself.
Placed within her oeuvre, this Self-Portrait stands as one of her most intimate achievements. Later, she would move toward color and abstraction, creating bold, expressive landscapes. But here, stripped of ornament and hue, she presents herself in elemental form. The portrait is not polished or complete; it is suspended in the act of becoming. That is precisely why it resonates.