Self-portrait

This is very likely the only painting Johannes Gumpp ever made, or at least the only one that survives, and he made it count. He shows himself three times over. In the centre, seen from behind and easy to miss at first, the painter sits at work. On the left, his face looks back out of a mirror. On the right, that same reflected face reappears as the portrait he is setting down on the easel. The picture walks you through its own making: the man, the image he sees, the image he records. Gumpp was Austrian, born in Innsbruck in 1626 into a family of architects. The canvas is round, about 89 centimetres across, and beyond it almost nothing of his life or later work is recorded.