When I first encountered Richard Maury’s Triple Self-Portrait, I was struck by its stillness. The room around the painting seemed to recede, as if sound itself had been absorbed into the canvas. Maury sits before a mirror, brush poised, his eyes steady but uncertain. Behind and beside him, two more reflections echo his form, each slightly altered, each a distortion of the one before it. The painting captures a moment of self-confrontation, an artist trying to see himself with impossible clarity.
Unlike Norman Rockwell’s playful Triple Self-Portrait, where humor and self-parody animate the scene, Maury’s version is hushed, almost monastic. His reflections are not caricatures of ego but meditations on being. They reveal a man engaged in the slow work of constructing himself, stroke by stroke, layer by layer.
I return often to that image because it mirrors something I feel every day in the classroom. Every now and again, one of my students tells me I’m a good teacher. I never quite know what to do with that statement. I appreciate it, deeply, but it doesn’t fit comfortably. The self they see and the one I experience don’t align. They see authority, guidance, structure. I see a man improvising, listening, adjusting, and often wondering if he’s doing enough.
Maury’s painting helps me understand that discomfort. It’s a portrait of discrepancy, of the space between image and self-image. Each reflection offers a partial truth. In the mirror closest to him, Maury appears most concrete, most himself. Yet in the subsequent reflections, he grows fainter, his features blurring into abstraction. The further the mirror extends, the less certain the self becomes.
So it is with teaching. There’s the self the students see, the one administrators observe, the one colleagues know, and then the private self who sits at the end of the day wondering if he’s done right by anyone at all. Each is true, and yet none is the whole. William James once wrote that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.” The classroom is filled with mirrors, each one holding a slightly different reflection of who I am.
And yet, these reflections are not distortions to be feared; they are instruments of becoming. The self is not a single, static truth but an accumulation of relationships. It is what Martin Buber might call an I–Thou encounter. Each moment of genuine connection draws us closer to coherence. Maury’s multiple selves do not cancel one another out; they build a composite, a more complete image of being.
Last week, I sat with a student who had simply broken. She entered quietly, eyes hollow, body tense, then just wept. When she finally spoke, her words came out in fragments. Words of rejection, isolation, the longing to belong. The person she’d trusted most had walked away, and she was left sitting alone again. Her tears did the speaking her language couldn’t manage.
I didn’t have answers. I didn’t try to fix anything. I just sat beside her in silence, both of us suspended in that fragile, unguarded space. That moment was a mirror too. It was one that reflected not my professional role but my shared humanity. In her, I saw my own need to be seen, my own longing for connection. Teaching, in that instant, wasn’t about instruction; it was about presence.
Carl Rogers would have called this openness to experience. Thst is, the ability to enter another’s emotional world without judgment. He wrote that “the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” The paradox applies to teaching as well: the more we release the need to perform the role of “teacher,” the more authentic and transformative our presence becomes.
Maury’s self-portrait embodies that same paradox. His gaze is searching but unguarded. He offers himself to the act of seeing, knowing that each reflection reveals and conceals in equal measure. The mirrors do not flatter; they tell the truth as light dictates it. There is a humility in that. There is a willingness to confront one’s incompleteness.
D.W. Winnicott called such spaces of encounter “transitional,” neither fully internal nor external. They are places where meaning is created in the act of shared imagination. The classroom, like Maury’s studio, is a transitional space. Each day begins as a blank canvas, a negotiation between selves. The teacher’s image refracts through thirty pairs of eyes, each one altering the light. What emerges is not control but communion. What emerges is a collective or co-construction of reality.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us that “the self is not a thing, but a movement toward coherence.” I think of that when I watch my students piece themselves together through stories, laughter, and sometimes tears. They are learning to see who they might become, just as I am learning, continually, to see who I am. The classroom becomes a hall of mirrors: every interaction another reflection of becoming, every reflection another lesson in empathy.
When I look again at Maury’s painting, I notice something subtle. Though the mirrors multiply him, the light remains constant. It threads through every reflection, uniting them. Perhaps that light is what holds us together, too. Perhaps, it is the shared awareness that passes silently between people, a recognition that even our fractured selves can still illuminate one another.
I am not, and may never feel like, a “good teacher.” But maybe that isn’t the point. Maybe the task is not to perfect the image but to stay present in front of the mirror and to look, to listen, to keep revising. Maury’s Triple Self-Portrait reminds me that identity is a practice, not a possession. Each day, like each brushstroke, brings me a little closer to coherence.
In the end, I think of Maury sitting there, brush in hand, facing his reflection with both doubt and devotion. He knows he’ll never capture himself completely, yet he paints. That, I realize, is what I do too. Every conversation, every moment of stillness, every time I sit with a student in silence, it is all part of the portrait.
And maybe, as the light changes and the mirrors multiply, that might just be good enough.