Celia Paul

Born in Thiruvananthapuram, Celia Paul, a British painter whose work is in the collections of the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, published her memoir, Self-Portrait, in 2019. “When I first started doing self-portraits,” she told an interviewer, “I did these portraits where my hand was kind of stretched out toward the canvas, as if about to paint. I suppose I was imitating those famous poses of Goya or Rembrandt. But something felt so false about that. Somehow women don’t have a secure place in the history of art, and to portray myself in this way standing squarely, about to paint, it wasn’t right.”