Portrait of a Man,

ca. 1804–08

Long considered a self-portrait, this striking image appears instead to depict a patron of the artist. It is rendered somewhat stiffly in a dark palette, with heavy use of brown and yellow, characteristic of Trumbull’s production in New York from 1804 to 1808, between residencies in London. Recent conservation at the Princeton University Art Museum has revealed the existence of the interior oval frame—at some point painted over for unknown reasons—which distinguishes the portrait even as it places the sitter at an additional formal and psychological remove from the artist. This distance decreases the likelihood that the work depicts Trumbull himself, whom it nonetheless resembles.