Self-portrait

By 1783 Jacob More had been living in Rome for a decade, a Scot who had left Edinburgh behind and made the city his home for good. There he painted the Roman countryside so convincingly that visitors nicknamed him the British Claude, after Claude Lorrain, the French master of golden landscapes, and simply More of Rome. A few years after this portrait the poet Goethe called on him and came away impressed, judging his work carefully thought out. What is striking here is the subject. More made his name with wide, sunlit views of hills and ruins, yet the Uffizi wanted his face, not his scenery, for its growing gallery of painters who had portrayed themselves. So the landscape man sat down and looked back at us instead. He never returned north, and died in Rome ten years later, in 1793, still the Scottish painter the Italians had claimed as their own.