The 1956 self portrait shows a young man’s identity and aspirations – each plane in the multi-faceted surface reflects some aspect of the artist’s profession: the foreground palette, the canvas to the left, the stacked canvases reflected in the mirror, what he has since described as the ‘enigma behind the right shoulder, part of a poster with a Japanese print on it’. The mid-50s smart young man of the painting has a keen, wide-eyed expression of self-reckoning in the mirror. The artist once asked why ‘did I elongate myself?’ Perhaps to accentuate – literally to heighten – the artist’s dignified self-absorption. In 2001, Berrisford asked, ‘And what is behind the head? After all these years I am not too sure! It may well be me in an oval mirror.