Self-Portrait by John Faed

This is John Faed's Self-Portrait, painted around 1850 and held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Faed was a Scottish painter who made his name with detailed literary and historical scenes, but here he turns the gaze on himself, presenting the calm, direct image of a mid-century gentleman.

Look at the patterned sash draped over his left shoulder. At a scroll's distance it reads as a generic decorative flourish, the kind of studio prop a painter might throw over a sitter for a dash of color. But zoom in tight and the pattern resolves into a woven tartan, a quiet assertion of his Scottish identity in an otherwise universal portrait formula.

Faed was born in 1819 in Gatehouse of Fleet, Scotland, and trained at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh. He moved to London in the 1840s and enjoyed a successful career exhibiting at the Royal Academy. This self-portrait dates from that early London period, when he was establishing himself in a competitive art world. The tartan sash is the one element that refuses to let the painting be just another anonymous gentleman's likeness.

The hidden detail is a small thing, but it tells you how Faed wanted to be remembered: not only as an accomplished painter but as a Scottish one.