Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Self-Portrait
John Singer Sargent American
Not on view
Alexander MacDonald, a granite merchant and fine-art collector from Aberdeen, Scotland, initiated a collection of portraits described as a "gallery of modern artists as exists nowhere else in the world." The collection comprises ninety-one mostly self-portraits that are uniform in size and shape, spanning the period 1880 to 1897. After MacDonald died in 1884, his wife, Hope Gordon MacDonald, continued his enterprise, and it must have been she who selected Sargent for the gallery. Though Sargent gazes directly at the viewer, the shadow cast on the left side of his face softens the confrontation.
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