In her self-portraits Louisa Matthiasdottir stands ramrod straight, head turned slightly to one side, often with her hands resting on her hips. She’s seventy-seven now, and, with her terrific bone structure, straight white hair, and blue eyes, she’s a wonderful portrait subject. She often paints herself at the center of a fairly large canvas, and she obviously enjoys the narcissistic rush that comes with putting herself in the kind of big portrait that was once reserved for the titled and the rich. Her portraits aren’t about lording it over us, but they’re not about leveling with us, either. In the self-portraits Matthiasdottir stands in the clear light of day: the luminous gray-blue air is a perfect medium in which to see the pinks of her skin, the brilliant stripes of a sweater, a green pair of shoes, her whole elegant-bohemian look. Matthiasdottir paints herself as an important person. She is so spare and ascetic-looking a figure—and she has such a gift for broad, lucid, unfussy paint handling—that the ultimate effect is of grandness without grandiosity.

Two of the five self-portraits that were in her show at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in March are extraordinary; their laconic titles are Self-Portrait with Red Sweater and Self-Portrait with Green Shoes. These two paintings, along with the five still lifes in the show, didn’t exhaust what Matthiasdottir had to offer—there were also five plaster busts and two landscapes, one mural-size— but it was the two self-portraits and the five still lifes that