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Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1956)
NMK painted two self-portraits separated by 15 years. The mature painting was his Mirror Self-Portrait (1971). He was already aged 40 when he completed this earlier version, for which he also utilised mirrors. The pose is traditional: the artist is shown to hip level sitting on a chair (one of the family’s kitchen chairs). He is cradling his palette in his right hand and pointing his brush, held in his left, at an unseen canvas. At school, NMK was hampered by the fact that he was left-handed. In those days, there was a strict rule that all children had to learn to write with their right hand. Consequently, he became ambidextrous: he wrote with his right hand with a fountain pen in a fine copper-plate script, but he always drew and painted with his left.
In this portrait, the artist is wearing his everyday clothes that he wore to work: shirt, tie and pinstripe navy trousers. However, the sleeves of his white shirt are rolled up, ready for painting in the studio. In the later self-portrait he is shown enveloped in his signature red smock. Here, the figure stands out against a rich crimson backcloth.
Elsewhere in his pictures, the artist appears as an onlooker, for example, in Billy Bunter and the Famous Five, painting in The Lambeth Walk and with his sketchbook in Britain by the Sea.