Self-portrait

In October 1879 Frederic Leighton, president of Britain's Royal Academy, was in Florence, and the director of the Uffizi pointed out an odd gap: not one living English painter hung in the gallery's famous collection of artists' self-portraits. He invited Leighton to send his own, and this is what arrived the next year. Leighton wears the gold chain and medal of his Academy office. Behind him he placed a section of the Parthenon frieze, the ancient Greek carving he prized above all else and echoed throughout his work.