This piece received the Best Selfie of the Artist, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine’s Artist and Selfie competition, 2020

In The Allegory of Painting, Brown has created a beautiful and iconographic self-portrait. The almost Egyptian pose of the figure is balanced, fills the painting with fun shapes, and the spotlight washing over the scene seems to indicate an inspired thought.

The painting plays on Cesare Ripa’s classic Iconologia, published in 1611 and hugely influential on painters, in which he prescribes the muse of painting (la Pittura) as:

A beautiful woman, with full black hair, disheveled, and twisted in various ways, with arched eyebrows that show imaginative thought, the mouth covered with a cloth tied behind her ears, with a chain of gold at her throat from which hangs a mask, and has written in front “imitation.” She holds in her hand a brush, and in the other the palette, with clothes of evanescently covered drapery…

Both Vermeer and Caravaggio both painted Allegories of Painting as self portraits at the easel, while a woman posed in the background. In 1630, Artemisia Gentileschi painted herself at the easel, and in a bold move adorned her own person to represent the allegory of painting. She includes the gold chain and mask, and is clothed in a fine gown. She omits, however, Ripa’s prescription for a cloth tied around her mouth, the symbol to show that painting is “mute poetry”. Gentileschi reminds us that through her art she indeed has a voice.

In Brown’s contemporary self portrait, she is at her easel, and the audience can see the painting they are looking at in progress on the easel itself, making it unmistakable that she is the artist of the piece in front of their eyes. This is a powerful way to claim ownership of the work. (If you notice, however, the painting on the easel is a mirror image.)

Instead of us looking over the shoulder of an unaware artist, Brown is turning to face the audience, almost exhibiting herself momentarily to the viewer, and the figure makes a great composition on the canvas. Like Gentileschi, and consistent with other female self portraits of the time such as Judith Lester, she is wearing a dress that she wouldn’t be caught dead painting in.

And she interprets Ripa’s prescription as a gag — with a bra.