Portrait of an Artist

When Charles Sumner died in March 1874, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had existed for only four years and did not yet have a building of its own. Sumner, the Massachusetts senator and opponent of slavery who had been beaten with a cane on the floor of the Senate in 1856, left the young museum his pictures and engravings. This small canvas, under 30 centimetres tall, was among them.

The title says only that it is a portrait of an artist. The museum catalogues it as a copy after Hyacinthe Rigaud, the French court portraitist, by an unknown hand, and thinks the original was a self-portrait by Rigaud that is now lost. Even that idea carries a question mark in the museum's records, and the copy is dated only as later than 1711.

The one photograph of it available is old and black and white, so the colours of the painting cannot be seen here.