Self-portrait

By the 1780s, Florence ran on visitors. British travellers on the Grand Tour came through the Uffizi wanting to carry a piece of it home, and someone had to paint the copies they bought. Between 1773 and 1793, Irene Parenti Duclos made 39 oil copies of the gallery's paintings, most of them for that trade. She was also known for encaustic, an old Roman way of painting with heated wax that Florence had grown curious about again in the 18th century. Here she turns from that copyist's work to her own face, brushes and palette in hand, at about 29. This canvas entered the Medici collection of artists' self-portraits, so the woman who reproduced the masters for tourists ended up hanging among them.