Self-portrait

The Uffizi keeps one of the oldest collections of artists' self-portraits in the world, begun in the 1660s by a Medici cardinal who asked painters to send in their own likenesses. To be invited into it two centuries later was a real honour, and William Holman Hunt used the chance to say something about who he was. He was one of three young Englishmen who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, painters after a sharper, brighter, almost obsessive truth to nature. By 1867 Hunt had also become a traveller. He had gone to Egypt and the Holy Land to paint biblical scenes on the actual ground where they happened, and here he shows himself not in a London studio coat but in Eastern dress, a painter who went east in the service of his art. He worked slowly, and he gave his own face the same unforgiving detail he gave everything else.