Self-portrait

Gaetano Chierici built his reputation on other people's kitchens. From the late 1860s he painted the inside of farmhouses and cottages around Reggio Emilia, his home city in northern Italy, filling them with children, grandmothers, cats and small domestic dramas, all rendered in patient, minute detail. Those pictures were gentle and funny, and they sold. This self-portrait, painted in 1881, shows the maker rather than the world he watched so closely. There is another life behind it too. Chierici taught drawing to working people for 25 years and, in 1900, became the first Socialist mayor of Reggio Emilia. The face here belongs to a man who spent his days recording ordinary households and then went on to serve one of them, his own city.