Self-Portrait

Paris in 1835 was five years into the reign of King Louis-Philippe, and its lawyers, bankers and clerks had settled on one garment, the black frock coat. Théodore Chassériau, still a teenager, painted himself in it. The dark cloth rises to his chin, one hand is slipped inside the coat, and the other rests on a small book on a table draped in red. The tools of his trade are pushed to the edge, a palette and brushes hanging on the wall in the upper corner. In 1846 the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote that this black coat had a beauty of its own, as the dress of the modern age. The painting came to the Louvre in 1933 as a gift from Baron Arthur Chassériau, of the painter's family, and it hangs in a room given to him and to the portrait around 1840.