Self-portrait

Emma Gaggiotti Richards was a Roman-born painter who made her name in Victorian Britain. In 1851 Queen Victoria saw a self-portrait of hers at the Royal Academy in London and liked it enough to commission another, which she gave to Prince Albert as a Christmas present in 1853. Emma had trained in Ancona under a local master and moved to England after marrying an Englishman, the writer Alfred Bate Richards. This self-portrait, painted around 1860, went to Florence rather than to a British patron, entering the Uffizi's collection of artists looking at themselves. She kept working for decades and died in 1912.