Autoportrait au gilet vert

Delacroix painted this, his one great self-portrait as a grown man, around 1837, when he was in his late 30s and the acknowledged head of the Romantic painters in France. He had the big public commissions now; he was covering the walls and ceilings of the Palais Bourbon, seat of the parliament, with murals. And yet the official art world kept its distance. The Academie des Beaux-Arts turned him down again and again, and would not finally elect him until 1857, near the end of his life. None of that friction shows here. He meets your eye directly, upright and a little guarded, the green waistcoat and dark coat almost swallowed by the brown shadow around him, the light catching only one side of his face. He kept the picture himself, and it reached the Louvre only after his death.