Autorretrato

By 1938 Henri Martin was 78 and had spent nearly 40 years at Marquayrol, the house above Labastide-du-Vert in the Lot valley that he bought in 1900 and painted over and over. His name had been made on public commissions, the big luminous murals for the Capitole in Toulouse and for the Hotel de Ville in Paris, a kind of painting Paris had stopped caring about long before this. The panel is small, 46 by 38 centimetres, and it is the last self-portrait he is known to have made. Earlier ones dressed him up, once as Saint John the Baptist, once with the tools of the trade on show. Here there is grey, a collar, and a pair of round spectacles.