Self-portrait

Late in 1863 the poet Charles Baudelaire published an essay in the Paris paper Le Figaro called The Painter of Modern Life, and one of its heroes was the flâneur, the well-dressed man who strolls the city, watching and being watched. Around the same time Degas painted himself in just that role. He lifts his top hat in greeting, a pair of pale gloves held in the same hand, the other hand tucked into his trouser pocket. The Gulbenkian Museum reads the gloves as a tribute to Titian, whose Man with a Glove hangs in the Louvre, and the wall opening onto a landscape at the right belongs to the Renaissance portrait tradition too. Of roughly 15 self-portraits Degas painted in the 1850s and 1860s, only two show him at half-length like this. Calouste Gulbenkian, the oil magnate, bought it in Paris in 1937.