Lutyens wrote to Borchard saying ‘I am afraid the only self portrait is one which I want to leave to my small daughter. I enclose a photograph’. In a later letter, he wrote: ‘I think the thing to do would be to let you have the painting of which I sent a photograph (since you say you like it) without any more fuss.’ Lutyens appears to have portrayed himself in the artistic, bohemian garb of the early-to-mid-eighteenth-century poet – flowing white cravat, Oriental-style hat, informal jacket. With his large forehead, somewhat beady eyes, and rather wizened folds of flesh and delicately drawn wrinkles, he comes across as an ascetic-featured sage, worn down perhaps by his years of learning. The area of blurry ‘cloud’ on the left of the canvas is especially evocative – possibly suggesting feelings of sublime emptiness, even intimations of death.