Self-portrait

By 1775 the Uffizi in Florence had spent generations gathering the portraits painters made of themselves, and a place in that company was one of the highest compliments a living artist could be paid. Joshua Reynolds, the first president of Britain's new Royal Academy, was asked to send one, and this is what he supplied. He shows himself not with palette and brushes but in the scarlet robes of the honorary doctorate Oxford had given him two years earlier, the very picture of a learned gentleman rather than a working tradesman. That was the argument of his whole career, that a painter belonged among scholars and poets. He built the pose out of his long study of Rembrandt, whose self-portraits he collected and openly admired.