After graduating from Harvard University with a degree in English Literature, George Tooker enrolled at the Art Students League, New York where he studied with painter Reginald Marsh. Marsh encouraged Tooker to work in the painstakingly laborious technique of egg tempera in which pigment is mixed with an egg yolk binder and applied to a gessoed panel. By the mid-1940s Tooker was exhibiting his work professionally and he soon became closely allied with two other representational painters with a similar sensibility, Paul Cadmus and Jared French. As a college student Tooker was particularly taken with Italian Renaissance painting of the quattrocento that he saw at the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard. Florentine Renaissance painting has continued to influence his work, and served as the inspiration for this self portrait, one of only a handful by the artist. Like many Renaissance self-portraits, Tooker depicts himself at work with brush in hand.