Self-portrait

Tito painted himself in 1919, the first year of peace after the Great War, in a Venice that had spent the conflict within range of Austrian aircraft. He was 60 that year and long established. Since 1894 he had held the chair of painting at the Accademia in Venice, the city whose lagoon light and working life filled most of his canvases. Here he turns that attention on himself, plainly, with none of the crowded movement of his fishing scenes and market pictures. It joined the Uffizi's celebrated collection of artists' self-portraits. Tito gives a sober, direct look, the face of a man who had watched the taste around him shift toward the modern while he kept to a fluent, painterly manner rooted in the old Venetian masters. He went on teaching in that manner until 1927.