TitleSelf-Portrait
Artist
Robert Bruce Crane
(American, 1857 - 1937)
Daten.d.
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 21 × 17 in.
SignedSigned on verso: "Bruce Crane by B.C."
SubmissionANA diploma presentation
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number300-P
Label TextThe acceptance of Crane's Associate diploma portrait is recorded in Council minutes of January 31, 1898, but the work is there described as being by Lawrence Carmichael Earle. The 1911 inventory of the Academy's collection, however, lists only a Crane self-portrait, which may be assumed to be the present painting. The minutes' reference to Earle could be an error, brought about by confusion over the fact that both artists were elected Associates in 1897. Alternatively, Crane could have substituted his self-portrait for one by Earle at a later date. However, size requirements for diploma portraits changed in 1898, from twenty by seventeen inches to thirty by twenty-five inches. Had Crane substituted a later portrait, it presumably would have been in the larger format. The inscription on the reverse cannot be trusted to have been made by Crane; it may be a form of labeling the Academy applied. However, stylistic evidence argues for Crane's authorship. When compared to Earle's Associate diploma self-portrait, the modeling of this painting appears relatively flat and less accomplished, unsurprising characteristics for an artist like Crane, who was almost exclusively a landscape painter.
