Self-portrait

Kerckhoven made his living painting things that do not move: dead game, birds, heaped fruit, the Flemish still life he carried to Venice, where clients knew him by the Italian name Giacomo da Castello. So when it came to painting himself, for the Medici collection of artists' self-portraits in Florence, he did the natural thing and put his trade in the picture beside him, presenting himself with a still life of the kind that made his name. Some scholars think that still life may be by another hand working with him, a common arrangement in busy Venetian workshops. He looks out at us from late in the 17th century, a northerner who had made himself thoroughly at home in Italy.