Self-Portrait

This print is a self-portrait of the artist at age seventy-six. An anxious-looking Tooker, sporting a full beard and mustache, looks away unable to meet the gaze of the viewer. Behind him stands the figure of death who places a bony hand upon the artist's right shoulder. The image echoes Swiss Symbolist Arnold Bocklin's 1872 painting "Self Portrait with Death Playing a Violin (Staatliche Museen, Berlin Germany). Yet as is the case with Tooker, he has transformed the image into an intimate and haunting depiction that could be read equally as witnesse's vision and projection of the artist's imagination.