2-999-683 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Self-Portrait in a Black Coat, 1848-1850 (?). In this small half-length self-portrait, Woodville fashions himself as a privileged urban gentleman, in a formal black coat, white shirt with wing collar, and a black bow tie. He has the smooth, broad forehead that contemporaries associated with superior intelligence and virtue; indeed, artist Chester Harding, who founded and guided the Boston Artists Association in the 1840s, was known to have told an aspiring painter he could never succeed "because his head was not big enough." Woodville fixes a penetrating, arrogant gaze on the viewer, embodying the elite social world in which he was raised and which he left behind in choosing the life of an artist.