Self-Portrait as Saint John the Baptist

In 1883 the Paris Salon handed Henri Martin a first-class medal. He was in his early twenties, four years down from Toulouse on a scholarship from his home city, and the picture that won it was a large canvas of Dante's doomed lovers, Paolo and Francesca, in hell. This one comes from the same year and is tiny beside it, 46 by 33 centimetres. He gave his own face to a saint. The beard is thin, the cheeks hollow, the chest bare under a flowered cloak, which is how a French art student of the time was taught to paint John the Baptist, the preacher who lived in the desert. The laurel in the hair is the part that does not belong to the Baptist. Laurel crowns poets and prize-winners. The canvas hangs today in the museum at Carcassonne, about 90 kilometres from the city that paid for his training.