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Toulouse-Lautrec rarely portrayed himself, and even when he did, tended to distance himself from the subject by means of irony and dissembling caricature. Self-Portrait in front of a Mirror is his only self-portrait. Even here his face is obscured by shadow and hardly discernible.
His congenital condition and the accidents of 1878 and 1879 had severely impaired his growth. His upper body had been able to develop normally, while his legs remained thin and brittle. In his self-portrait the painter gives the viewer no hint of his stunted growth or of his features disfigured since puberty.
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