Kernn-Larsen was a Danish Surrealist artist, to whom Peggy Guggenheim gave an exhibition at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938. This was Peggy’s first Surrealist show and this painting was included. This self-portrait, tellingly titled Know Thyself, develops its automatic line from the artist’s own features, and merges images arising from the unconscious, combining both memory and dream. It references the myth of the femme-arbre (woman-tree) by depicting metamorphic leaves of a tree branch transforming into female lips.