Self-portrait

In 1694 the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de' Medici, wrote to Schalcken, then a Dutch painter in his fifties, asking for one specific thing: a portrait of the painter by his own hand. The Medici had been assembling a gallery of artists' self-portraits for about thirty years, and they wanted him in it. He finished the picture in the first days of 1695, and by that October it had reached Florence, where it has stayed in the Uffizi. He did not show himself in plain daylight. He set his own face against the dark, drawn out by a single candle, in the manner buyers across Europe paid him for.