Self-Portrait, 1909

This a Sarian’s first pictorial ‘Self-Portrait’ created in 1909. It is the sketch of the ‘Self-Portrait’ executed in the same year and kept in the Tretyakov Gallery.
Sarian painted himself ‘walking through the valleys and mountains, in the sun, illuminated with the golden sun rays. S.I.Shchukin, a noted art connoisseur and collector of modern French paintings, on seeing Sarian’s masterpiece exclaimed: ‘It is wonderful.
You are a great portraitist’ and ordered his son’s portrait. The work is more than a self-portrait – this is rather an extremely generalized image of creative individual that accumulates in him the power of nature. Sarian uses expressive contrasting colors and paints with confidence with free and wide dabs. Both the self-portrait and mountains in the background are executed in the same manner. Thus the impression is created that a Man ‘sprouts out’ of the nature and that he is its continuation and integral part.
Only through human being nature can perceive itself. The unity of nature and a Man is the main pantheistic idea realized in the 1909 ‘Self-Portrait’.