Self Portrait

Allston painted this in Rome in 1805 and put the city into the picture. At the centre left you can read W. Allston, Romae, 1805, in Latin capitals. He was in his mid-twenties, a South Carolinian who had trained at the Royal Academy in London and come on to Italy to study the old masters. He shows himself with an open collar, a loosely knotted cravat and dark curls falling over his forehead, the look of the sensitive, poetic young artist that his Romantic generation admired. He kept the canvas for many years, and by 1839 he had given it to Mary Preble Amory of Newport, Rhode Island. After her death it passed to her sister. By 1871 it belonged to John Taylor Johnston, the New York railroad man who was the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Johnston's pictures were sold in December 1876, the Bostonian Alice Hooper bought this one for 925 dollars. She died three years later, and her bequest brought it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1884.