Self-Portrait
Downton was a very gifted individual as a musician, poet and philosopher as well as a painter and art theorist. The three years he spent at Cambridge University reading the History of Art developed his position as an intellectual with firm beliefs on art and the world in general. It came as no surprise that when Downton attended the Slade School of Art in London he left after just one year because he disagreed with their views on painting, which he considered to be too modern. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Downton felt a necessity to look to the past for inspiration. As a committed realist painter he rejected the mainstream of British art at the time and felt that it was moving further and further away from his own ideals, venturing even more closer to the field of abstraction. This is probably Downton's earliest self-portrait and was produced duringhis time at the Slade. Unlike his numerous self-portrait drawings that depict an immediate response to nature and observational study, his paintings are far more planned and bear specific reference to the art of the past. For this particular work he draws inspiration from the work of two great master painters, Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Durer (1471-1528).
