Self-Portrait

Scholar Frederick Voss has suggested that Frazee's use of the herm form was inspired by a cast of a bust of Alexander the Great that was in the collection of the American Academy of Fine Arts in the 1820s. The boldly presented inscription at the base of the work has never been fully interpreted. Frazee was far from being a scholar, and his initials may well stand for some self-invented phrase in Latin.

The Academy's cast of Frazee's self-portrait is one of two known plasters. The other, now in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., descended in the Frazee family. It seems to have been the cast that was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1832, then returned to the Pennsylvania Academy as a loan from the Frazee family, where it remained from 1863 until about 1905.