Self-Portrait

Joshua Reynolds painted this to hang in the Royal Academy's grand new rooms at Somerset House, and he made sure it said exactly who he was. He shows himself in the scarlet robes of an honorary doctorate that Oxford had given him in 1773, the dress of a scholar rather than a working painter. Beside him stands a bust of Michelangelo, whom he revered above all other artists and whose ideas he called the language of the gods. Reynolds was the Academy's first president and one of Britain's leading arbiters of taste, and everything here is arranged to make that claim. Look closely and the marble Michelangelo seems to lean toward him, tilted in his direction as if in quiet agreement.