Self-portrait

This is one of the first self-portraits Rubens painted on its own, made around 1618, when he was in his early forties and already running the busiest studio in Antwerp. Look closely and you are mostly looking at his face. Specialists believe Rubens painted the head, and that the rest of the figure was filled in roughly 100 years later, when the picture was being prepared for the gallery where it now hangs. It reached Florence as a gift. Johann Wilhelm, the Elector Palatine, was married to a Medici, and he sent the portrait to her father, Grand Duke Cosimo III, for the collection of artists' self-portraits the Medici were assembling. That collection still exists, and Rubens looks out from within it, in the plain white collar and dark coat of a working painter.