Selbstporträt Schewtschenkos (Winter 1840/1841)

Shevchenko had been a serf until 1838, owned like property, when a group of St. Petersburg artists and writers bought his freedom. They raised the money by raffling off a portrait that the leading painter Karl Bryullov had made for the cause. Freedom let him enrol at the Imperial Academy of Arts, and he painted this self-portrait in the winter of 1840 to 1841, in his mid-twenties, looking out with the calm confidence of a young man just handed his own life. That same stretch of years his first book of Ukrainian poems appeared and made his name as a poet. Ukraine later put this very face on its 100-hryvnia banknote, so a man born a serf now looks out from the country's money.