Tommaso Minardi Rubens' Self-portrait in a Hat, Copy after Uffizi Gallery Painting

An original early 19th-century watercolour painting – Tommaso Minardi, Rubens' Self-portrait in a Hat, Copy after Uffizi Gallery Painting.

This intense and affecting portrait is a copy of a Rubens Self-portrait from 1623–5, painted by the 19th-century Italian artist Tommaso Minardi (1787–1871). Minardi is identified as the artist on the back of the painting, where he is described as 'Director of the Accademia di San Luca, Rome', where he taught from 1822 to 1858.

Minardi was an influential teacher in Rome in the early 19th century. He was recommended to the post at the Accademia di San Luca by the sculptor Antonio Canova. A young and talented draughtsman, Minardi was lively and charismatic, deeply impressing the students of the academy and bringing a fresh perspective to the institution dominated by classicist painters.

Minardi's own work transitioned from Neoclassicism in his youth to Romanticism. He became a leading figure of the Italian Purismo movement in the 1820s (influenced by the German Nazarenes), which rejected Neoclassicism and sought to return to the formal values of the early Renaissance Italian art. The movement also advocated a closer observation of nature, imbued with a deep sense of religiosity.

Minardi acquired a deep knowledge of art history first-hand, through his role of inspecting, cataloguing and preserving antiquities and church artworks, as a member of two committees, at first in Perugia (the Commissione Ausiliaria Antichità e Belle Arti della Delegazione di Perugia) and later in Rome (the Commissione Centrale Antichità e Belle Arti, in Rome). He developed a reputation as a man of letters, frequently lecturing on art history and becoming increasingly influential in the direction and teachings of the Accademia in Rome, culminating with his election as president of the academy in 1837.

It is interesting to view this copy of Rubens in this light: Minardi strongly honed his own craft and developed his art theoretical ideology through the study of earlier artists. Although Rubens's art represented a dramatic Baroque tradition that Minardi came to fight against, this self-portrait at the Uffizi has a direct restraint—an emphasis on light and dark and emotional connection—that likely appealed to Minardi's sensibilities.

In watercolour with a surface varnish on thin card.