Self-portrait

In 1879 the Uffizi asked one of Britain's most famous painters to send them his own face. John Everett Millais had been a teenage prodigy, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and by his fifties he was among the most successful artists in Victorian Britain. The invitation came through Frederic Leighton, the head of the Royal Academy, who had met the Uffizi's director while staying in Florence. It was a real honour. The gallery's collection of self-portraits by artists' own hands stretched back centuries and included the greatest names in European painting, and a living Englishman was being asked to join them. Millais answered plainly. He shows himself around 1880 not as a celebrity but as a tradesman of paint, in a brown working jacket, palette in hand, against a bare background, meeting the viewer's eye. He was 50 or 51 when he set down this steady, unglamorous account of himself.