Self-portrait

The Uffizi holds one of the oldest collections of artists' self-portraits in the world, and most of those faces belong to professional painters. Louisa Grace Bartolini was not quite that. Born in Bristol in 1818 to an Irish family, she settled in Tuscany in her early twenties and became known in Pistoia as a poet and a translator, carrying English and American verse into Italian. Her salon drew leading Italian writers, among them the young poet Giosue Carducci. She painted this self-portrait in 1862, a few years after her marriage and a few before her early death in 1865, and with it she stayed among the artists on the Uffizi's walls.