Self Portrait (c.1890 CE)

Hilma af Klint’s Self Portrait is a delicate and deeply introspective watercolor, painted around 1890 when the artist was in her late twenties. In this small yet quietly compelling work, a young woman in three-quarter profile looks outward with a dreamy, slightly melancholic expression. The cool dominance of blue, the soft golden light across the forehead, and the fluid transparency of the watercolor already suggest the spiritual and symbolic language that would later make af Klint one of the earliest pioneers of abstract art. Though created during her conventional and realistic period, the portrait feels like a threshold, a still moment before the unknown opened.

A Young Artist in Stockholm

Hilma af Klint painted this self-portrait shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she was among the few women admitted and received a rigorous academic training in portraiture, landscape, and botanical drawing. The death of her younger sister Hermina in 1880 had already awakened in her a lasting interest in spiritualism and the afterlife. By around 1890, when this watercolor was made, af Klint was supporting herself as a professional portrait and landscape painter in her studio on Hamngatan in central Stockholm, while at the same time quietly pursuing occult and spiritual questions beyond public view.

In 1896, she co-founded the spiritualist group De Fem (The Five) with four other women. Through séances and automatic drawing, they believed they were receiving messages from higher spiritual entities, or High Masters. This self-portrait therefore belongs to the last years of her outwardly conventional artistic life, before she began in 1906 the monumental abstract cycle Paintings for the Temple, which would remain hidden for decades in accordance with her own wishes.

A Portrait from a Double Life

Hilma af Klint kept many of her early realistic works as private documents rather than public exhibition pieces. She signed them discreetly with “H. af Klint,” rather than her full name, a modest gesture characteristic of many women artists of the period, who were seldom granted full recognition in academic circles. Friends who visited her studio in the 1890s later recalled that she was always surrounded by botanical drawings and portraits, yet spoke very little about the spiritual experiments she was already pursuing alongside them. In that sense, this self-portrait preserves a rare visible trace of the double life she carefully maintained: the respectable academic painter outwardly, and the mystic, and future abstract pioneer, inwardly.

Technique, Color, and Inner Light

This modest watercolor is an important work for understanding Hilma af Klint’s development. It shows her full command of traditional portrait technique, with its soft modeling of flesh, delicate shifts of light, and quiet psychological depth. At the same time, it already reveals color choices that would become central to her later symbolic language: blue associated with the feminine and spiritual realm, and yellow-gold with enlightenment. The gentle light on the forehead has often been read as an early sign of the inner illumination or aura that she would continue to explore throughout her life.

Watercolor and Luminous Restraint

The work is executed in watercolor on paper and measures 25.4 × 30.5 cm, or 10 × 12 inches. It is signed “H. af Klint” in black ink in the lower right corner. The painting is built from transparent, layered washes typical of late nineteenth-century academic watercolor practice. The cool blue background is formed through multiple glazes, while the warm yellow highlight on the forehead is laid in with remarkable economy, preserving its luminosity. The fluid character of the medium is especially well suited to af Klint’s growing interest in the ethereal and the intangible.

Preserved by the Foundation

The original painting remained in private or family ownership and is today preserved and managed by the Hilma af Klint Foundation in Stockholm, established after her nephew Erik af Klint carried out her wishes in the 1960s and 1970s.