oil on board · c. 18— · unknown hand
catalogued as a self-portrait because of the angle of the gaze: the eyes look out and slightly down, the way a painter's eyes look when they are checking their own face in a mirror. by no other evidence is it a self. no signature, no studio mark, no record of who held it before it came here.
the face is unfinished — or rather, the face is finished and then thinned to the point of almost going away. visitors who have stayed in the house have variously identified the sitter as a stranger, a neighbour, a grandfather of someone who has never lived here, and themselves. there is no way to be sure.
field-note a date is scratched into the lower corner of the board, behind the frame. it is partial. it could be any decade in the last two hundred years that began with 1.
mirror a woman at a window stranger me someone reading a letter