Self-portrait with cigarette

Feuerbach's 'Self-Portrait with Cigarette' of 1871 is among the most psychologically penetrating works he produced, painted during a period of professional frustration and personal reassessment. By 1871 Feuerbach had spent the better part of a decade in Rome, completing major works but finding himself increasingly out of step with the dominant taste of the German art market, which favoured either academic historicism or the sentimental Biedermeier idiom. The cigarette — a deliberately modern, informal accessory — signals a self-conscious departure from the grand self-presentation of earlier artist-portraits. Feuerbach looks directly at the viewer with a gaze that critics have described as simultaneously confident and melancholy. The painting was acquired by the Belvedere in Vienna, the museum that had granted him the professorship he had long sought, though his years in Vienna (1873–76) would ultimately prove unhappy. Self-portraiture occupied Feuerbach throughout his career as a means of working out his identity as the heir to a classical tradition he feared was dying.

The bust-length format places the artist's face and upper torso in close confrontation with the viewer, the neutral dark background eliminating any environmental distraction. Feuerbach models his own features with frank directness, avoiding both flattery and caricature. The small cigarette between his fingers introduces a note of casual informality that disrupts the otherwise classical self-presentation.