Self-portrait

The face here belongs to a painter who spent most of his working life not at an easel but backstage. Josef Hoffmann was one of Vienna's busy scene-painters, designing sets for the city's opera and theatres, and he also made sweeping panoramas of the primeval world, landscapes of an earth before people. In 1886 he sent this self-portrait to the Uffizi, whose long gallery of artists' self-portraits was still taking in new faces. A man who spent his days conjuring painted illusions on a grand scale here presents himself plainly, at ordinary size.