On the “Self-portrait in the Garden” the artist presented himself in a 17th-century costume. It stands in the Versailles garden, elegant and refined – a marble vase with gilding, a French park and a marble statue in the background. The composition takes the form typical of such canvases: the figure of the person portrayed in the center acquires significance and monumentality, thanks to the understated horizon line.
The lushness of the costume and entourage, the romantically rebellious sky in the background give the portrait a spirit of theatricality, art play. Veland Schmid, biographer de Chirico, explains the artist’s passion for dressing in preparation for writing self-portraits: “He puts on a nobleman’s suit or condottiere and places himself in different epochs.
He closes his face with a wax or even a stone mask, wins his melancholy, the oppressed state of the spirit, and pushes all his personal feelings to the distant plane. For him, only clothes, their color and texture are important, in one word – painting. The artist, as it were, competes with the masters of those epochs, in the entourage of which he places his double, the epochs, in each of which he would like to visit. “
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