We present a light-front determination of the pionic contribution to the nucleon self-energy, ${\Sigma }_{\pi }$, to second order in pion-baryon coupling constants that allows the pion-nucleon vertex function to be treated in a model-independent manner constrained by experiment. The pion mass $\mu$ dependence of ${\Sigma }_{\pi }$ is consistent with chiral perturbation theory results for small values of $\mu$ and is also linearly dependent on $\mu$ for larger values, in accord with the results of lattice QCD calculations. The derivative of ${\Sigma }_{\pi }$ with respect to ${\mu }^2$ yields the dominant contribution to the pion content, which is consistent with the $\overline{d}\mathrm{\text{−}}\overline{u}$ difference observed experimentally in the violation of the Gottfried sum rule.