The painter Tibor Ernő was born in Oradea in 1885. He studied in Budapest and Paris, at the Julian Academy. He worked in many European cities, then returned to Oradea where he taught at the School of Painting. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz. In 1945 he died in Dachau.

An overview of the painter's career shows the openness with which he experimented with a variety of styles. The green mustache, the turquoise jaw, the orange lips are imprints of the Fauvist current, an avant-garde movement in which colors were no longer used by the logic of fidelity to nature, but were chosen in such a way as to create the most intense and bright chromatic contrasts.

If in a work built on the logic of recessive color theory, a blue surface would have been diluted in the background like a shadow, in Ernő's self-portrait, saturated blue seems to detach from the work due to the fact that the artist uses both cold and dark colors, on shaded surfaces as well as on light surfaces.