Autoportrait

An old man in a soft hat, white-bearded, with heavy brows and a level gaze, stands out of a darkness that swallows everything but the head. Jean-Jacques Henner (1829–1905) painted this self-portrait around 1890, in the decade before his death, when he was one of the most honoured painters in France — a Prix de Rome laureate of 1858, a member of the Institut, a commander of the Legion of Honour — and the portrait shows the professional manner that earned all of it: figures emerging from an oil ground of bituminous dark, faces modelled in a slow sfumato learned from the Titians and Leonardos he copied in the Villa Médicis years. Henner built his career on that chiaroscuro, most famously in the red-haired women and pale Magdalenes that made his name with the public, and he painted himself in the same terms — less a likeness than a demonstration of what light, emerging slowly from black, could do. The Petit Palais holds one of the two great Henner collections, alongside the museum in his native Alsace; this canvas belongs to the bequest of his model and patron Eugénie-Marie Gadiffet-Caillard, the « Suzanne » of his late idylls, whose own portrait Henner painted in 1892.