'The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher; by so much more am I an artist - a creative artist.'
Vincent Van Gogh

The Romantic idea of the artist as visionary was revived with increasing fervour in the 1880s. According to Symbolist artists and writers, bourgeois culture had been corrupted by materialism, and it was the role of the artist to reveal spiritual truths.

Believing that the inspired artist was destined to suffer for his art, many artists assumed the identity of the martyr or Christ figure. In this picture of Christ on the eve of his crucifixion, Gauguin gave Christ his own features, and Van Gogh's red hair. In 1890 he wrote to his friend, the artist Emile Bernard, 'Yes we are destined (we searching thinking artists) to perish under the blows of the world.'

Gerstl's self portrait recalls images of the risen Christ, an allusion that was especially loaded as the artist had a Jewish background. By identifying with Christ he could express the persecution he experienced in the anti-Semitic society of fin-de-siècle Vienna, and simultaneously claim his place within it. In 1908 Gerstl committed suicide by cutting his throat in front of a mirror.

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