Sir Joshua Reynolds (after the Self Portrait in the Uffizi)

As the first President of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds sought to build respectability for his profession, cultivating an identity as a learned and gentlemanly painter. In his 1775 self-portrait presented to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Reynolds appears not at his easel with palette and brush but in the guise of a man of letters. Wearing the academic robes of his honorary doctorate from Oxford University, Reynolds holds drawings by "the divine Michelangelo," which proclaim his self-declared lineage with the Old Master.