Autorretrato

Poussin was the most admired French painter of his day, yet he spent almost his entire career in Rome rather than Paris. He painted this self-portrait there in 1650, a Holy Year in the city, for his close friend Paul Freart de Chantelou, who had been asking him for one for years as a token of their friendship. Poussin was 56, and he shows himself plainly, with no flattery, in a dark cloak against a stack of canvases, one hand resting on a folder of papers that stands for the long correspondence the two men kept up across the distance. He actually made two portraits that same year, one for Chantelou and one for another patron in Paris. This is the sterner of the pair, and it is the face by which he has been remembered ever since.