Although it may be the most memorable of his self-portraits, Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro is not a definitive image of the artist. The sheer diversity of his self-portraits demonstrates Lewis’s views on the changeable nature of the human psyche; self-portraits were an opportunity for him to project a constructed persona, rather than to reveal his own true self. Lewis consciously avoided creating a definitive self-portrait, explaining that “an attempt to do so would only lead to one’s appearing either too pleased with oneself or not pleased enough.” The painting was first exhibited in the ‘Tyros and Portraits’ exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in 1921, along with other paintings of Tyros, but Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro and A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) (1920–1) are the only surviving oil paintings of Tyro subjects.