Self Portrait with Black Eye Patch
Artist / maker
Rik Wouters (painter)Date
(1915)Period
20th centuryCollection
Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
Trials In the summer of 1915, Rik Wouters underwent an operation that disfigured his face and cost him an eye and part of his jawbone. After three years of severe recurring headaches, it had become clear that he had cancer. Wouters died on 11 July 1916, just shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, two years after making his breakthrough thanks to…
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Trials
In the summer of 1915, Rik Wouters underwent an operation that disfigured his face and cost him an eye and part of his jawbone. After three years of severe recurring headaches, it had become clear that he had cancer. Wouters died on 11 July 1916, just shy of his thirty-fourth birthday, two years after making his breakthrough thanks to successful exhibitions in Brussels and Antwerp. His work had also been shown in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.
The fact that the Mechelen-born artist died in Amsterdam was due to the First World War. Wouters was a soldier in the Belgian infantry when, fleeing from the Germans, he was interned as a prisoner of war in Zeist in the neutral Netherlands. Thanks to the intervention of acquaintances, however, he was allowed to live freely in Amsterdam with his wife, muse and model Helene (Nel) Duerinckx. That is, until terminal illness set in.
This moving self-portrait is one of Wouters’ final works. According to Nel, Rik used a mirror to paint a portrait ‘radiant with joie-de-vivre’ over three sessions. She persuaded him to do it, ‘so that later, after he recovered, it would remind us of our trials’. The work’s simplicity and monumentality are typical of the paintings and sculptures Wouters produced as early as 1914.
Ludo van Bogaert, a celebrated neurologist and art-lover, bequeathed this canvas to the KMSKA together with another twelve paintings, eight sculptures and thirty-three works on paper by Wouters. Van Bogaert had been a friend of the artist’s widow.
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