Femme au miroir

This dates from 1867, when Paul Cézanne was 28 and an outsider in Paris, a provincial from Aix whose canvases the official Salon kept turning away year after year. His painting then looked nothing like the luminous work to come. He laid on dark, earthy colour in thick, heavy strokes, often driving the paint with a palette knife. A woman at her mirror is an ordinary enough subject, treated here in the rough, forceful manner of his early years. The picture has since come home to Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne was born and first studied drawing, and hangs today in the Musée Granet, a few streets from the school where he began.