Self-portrait

For about 30 years Franz Xaver Winterhalter painted almost every court in Europe. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert sat for him, so did the Empress Eugénie of France and the young Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the one later remembered as Sisi. He gave sovereigns exactly what they wanted, glossy silks, flawless skin, an easy grandeur, and they passed his name from one palace to the next. This self-portrait entered the Uffizi's collection of artists' self-portraits in the late 1860s, and in it he wears the red ribbon of the French Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. A son of a small farming family in the Black Forest, he had risen through those royal commissions to become the painter the courts could not do without. He made it only a few years before he died in 1873, of typhoid caught in Frankfurt.