Self-portrait

By 1750 Violante Siries had done something almost no woman of her time was allowed to do. She had been given leave to set up her easel inside the Florentine gallery and copy the old masters directly, the first woman granted that permission. The training behind it was unusual too. The daughter of a French-born engraver who cut gems for the Medici court, she had gone to Paris as a young woman and studied with Hyacinthe Rigaud, who painted kings, and with the fashionable François Boucher. She was in her early forties when she set down her own features here, a portraitist by then in demand across Florence. Three of her self-portraits ended up in the same gallery whose old masters she had once been let in to copy.