Autoportrait au béret (Self-Portrait with a Beret)

The Museum of Fine Arts thinks this is the last time Cézanne painted himself. His son later wrote 1898 on a photograph of it, and the catalogue of his paintings places it between 1898 and 1900, when Cézanne was about 60. It is unevenly finished. The jacket is thinly brushed, the chair behind him is barely there, and the eyes get almost no detail, so he seems to look past whoever stands in front of him. The cheekbone and the forehead, by contrast, are built from separate, carefully placed patches of colour. From his dealer Ambroise Vollard the canvas went to Egisto Fabbri, an American-born painter living in Florence who collected Cézanne early. In 1920 Fabbri lent it to the Venice Biennale, which gave Cézanne a room of his own that year. In November 1928 Fabbri sold 13 of his Cézannes to the Paris dealers Georges Wildenstein and Paul Rosenberg, and they were shipped out of Italy. By the following year this one was in Boston with Robert Treat Paine, and in 1972 his daughter Elizabeth sold it to the museum, giving part of its value as a gift.