Self-portrait

This is an old master looking at himself late in life. Gyula Benczur painted it in 1917, when he was 73 and among the most honoured painters in Hungary, celebrated for vast historical canvases of coronations and battles. The year matters. 1917 was the last full year of Austria-Hungary, the empire he had served with grand official pictures, and it would be gone within two years of this quiet, close look at his own face. The self-portrait belongs to the Uffizi collection begun centuries ago, in which artists give the gallery their own likeness. Benczur sent his near the end of a long career, painted in the confident academic style he had taught to a generation of Hungarian students.