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We know only two self-portraits by Mányoki: one from his youth, a washed drawing made in 1693 (formerly in Budapest, Lajos Ernst Collection) and this half-figure portrait showing the mature artist. In his charmingly confident craftsman-portrait he depicts himself a work, holding a palette and brushes in his hand, wearing a shirt with rolled-up sleeves, opening over his chest. In a trick of self-portraits popular since Rembrandt, the soft velvet hat with its upturned rim casts a warm brown shadow over the upper half of his face. Those warm reddish-brown half-shades and the tonal richness of the eyes' area modelled with reflexive lights and kept in shadow represent here a completely new, relaxed pictorial quality as compared to Mányoki's painstaking formation of details made by almost drawing with his brush.
There is nothing here to forecast the virtuoso glazing technique appearing in the portrait of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II. made hardly a little later in Gdansk (now at the Magyar Nemzeti Galéria), that fine painting resulting in surfaces without brush marks, appearing in the Prince's portrait as one of the results of the artist's stay in the Netherlands; the other is his handling of the light: the pictorial contrast between the environment rich in dark tones and the lighted face. It is interesting, for Mányoki had been to Netherlands before painting this self-portrait. Yet the different tasks provided by the two pictures demanded different approaches, which meant applying the appropriate style, giving room also to the associations of mood attached to the style. The pictorial prototypes of this genre-like self-portrait may be found in those early works of Antoine Pesne (his French contemporary artist appointed to be Court Painter in Berlin, 1710) made either during Pesne's stay in Venice or, following that, during his first years in Berlin. With those single-figure folk narratives painted in an intimate mood and built on the range of brown, red and white tones, Pesne passed on to Mányoki the treasure of experience in approach and colouring that he had gained earlier in the circle of Andrea Celesti and possibly through his knowledge of Piazzetta's works. The recognition of the pictorial source enabled scholars to put this self-portrait of much-debated dating in its place in Mányoki's oeuvre. Until the beginning of our century the painting was kept in the Schleiszheim Gallery.
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