Self-portrait

The Uffizi holds a collection unlike any other, thousands of portraits that artists made of themselves. The Medici began gathering them in the 1660s, and later directors kept the tradition going by inviting living painters to send in their own likeness. This is Jean-Paul Laurens's contribution, painted in 1876, when he was 38. In France he was one of the most admired history painters of his day, known for stern, dramatic scenes from the Middle Ages, dungeons, excommunications, the hard machinery of church and state. Here he sets all of that aside and simply looks out at us, a working artist recording his own face for Florence. Laurens later decorated the Paris city hall and the Panthéon, and he kept painting until his eyesight gave out near the end of his life.