Between spring 1982 and April 1983, Kitaj and Sandra Fisher lived at 61 rue Galande in Paris – a period which he almost immediately mythologised as ‘the year I lived in Paris’. Life drawing and a deepened sense of Jewish identity provided the impetus for constructed autobiography in his work. In Paris, he made several self-portrait drawings including Self-Portrait (Cold in Paris), Self-Portrait (Greta Prozor) [L365] and Self-Portrait for a Convex Mirror [L366], which were exhibited together in Kitaj’s solo exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in 1985. In this work Kitaj imagined himself as a creation of the quattrocento Tuscan painter Matteo di Giovanni (circa 1430–1495). Kitaj was apt to perform this kind of roleplay, frequently personifying himself as characters in his paintings (he later cast himself as the referee in his painting Whistler vs. Ruskin (1992) [L577], for instance).

Whilst in Paris, Kitaj worked with the printmaker Aldo Crommelynck, who had worked with Picasso and introduced David Hockney to an efficient method of colour printing. Self-Portrait (After Matteo) and another drawing, Self-Portrait (Reading) [L364], were traced for soft-ground etchings in Crommelynck’s studio.