Self-Portrait at Sainte Pelagie

Sainte-Pelagie is an address

The name in this title belongs to a place in Paris, not to the person in the picture. French naming puts saints on streets, gates, quarters and institutions in enormous numbers, and a painter who records where a canvas was made inherits the saint along with the location. Nothing devotional is involved, and the record agrees: the entry is filed under portraiture and male portraiture, with no religious category of any kind.

Why the entry is in this catalogue

This collection gathers works whose titles contain the word saint, and a great many of what that sweep catches are place names. They are kept and labelled rather than removed, because the alternative — silent deletion — leaves a reader who searched for the place with nothing at all.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1873 and gives the Musée Courbet, Ornans, France as its location. The dimensions are 92 x 73 cm, an upright at the standard size for a half-length figure. The style is given as Realism and the nationality as French; the measured colour family is brown. A self-portrait recorded at a named address is a particular kind of entry: the title fixes a place and a year, and the picture's subject is the person who was there. What that placement meant is not something the record states, and nothing is inferred from it here.