Self-Portrait with Family Coat of Arms

By 1710 Johann Rudolf Huber had already painted a great many of the citizens of Basel and Bern, keeping a register of every sitter who came through his studio. Here he turns the brush on himself and adds something a mere craftsman would not: his family's coat of arms, set beside his own likeness. In the early 18th century that was a quiet claim. Painting was still argued over as either a manual trade or a liberal, gentleman's art, and a painter who showed his arms was placing himself among the gentry. The face is plain and slightly turned, the eyes of a man used to studying other people. Decades later the Augsburg engraver Johann Jakob Haid copied the picture into a print, which is how Huber's own likeness reached people who had never sat in front of him.