Self-Portrait

In 1902 France made Franz von Lenbach a commander of the Legion of Honour, one more distinction for a painter who had spent decades on emperors, chancellors and a pope. In those final years he kept coming back to his own face. Shortly before his death he painted a series of self-portraits that closely resemble one another, and the museum dates this one to 1902 or 1903. Another from the same group, which he left to his younger daughter Gabriele, is in private hands. This version is on cardboard, nearly a metre high. The museum lists what it shows, the beard, the gaze, a palette and a pair of spectacles. By then his eyesight was weakening with age, and he painted himself wearing the glasses he had come to need.