This is Saul Steinberg. And that is Saul Steinberg, as a life-sized paper cutout of his younger self.
Adult Steinberg is on the right – bald, moustached, dark glasses, a three-piece suit and a striped tie. He stands on an orange floor in front of a pale wall. Next to him, at about waist height, is a paper cutout of himself as a small boy, in an old-fashioned uniform with a large white collar.
Adult Steinberg reaches down to hold the cutout’s hand.
Steinberg made the original of this himself. He took a photograph of his own boyhood, blew it up to life size, cut it out, and then photographed himself standing beside it – holding hands with his boy self, the way you might hold a child’s hand at a formal event.
I have redrawn the photograph here, in my own line.
It pleases me: a drawing of a photograph of an illustrator holding hands with a photograph of himself. Silly and meta at once. Pictures inside pictures – a game I find myself playing across this whole show.
Saul Steinberg has been a hero of mine for years. When I first came across this photograph of his – long after I had begun drawing myself with Little JP and Teenage JP throughout A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown, and long after I had drawn other people with their younger selves (Ben Akers holding little Ben, Salwa Emerson beside her thirteen-year-old self, NJ’s father across three photographs) – it was like finding out a hero had been playing the same game, decades before me.
This piece is a small acknowledgement. Steinberg was doing all of this decades before I got anywhere near it. Standing beside himself, in a suit, on an orange floor.
This is one of the portraits in Contain Multitudes, my show at Burgh House, Hampstead, 18-23 August 2026.