Portrait de l'artiste (Self-Portrait)

When Duncan Phillips first saw Cezanne, at a Paris exhibition in 1912, he wrote the whole room off as a bunch of damn fools. By 1925 he was calling the same painter a towering genius, and in 1928 he bought this head for his museum in Washington, the first Cezanne self-portrait to enter an American museum collection. The picture was about fifty years old by then. Cezanne painted it around the age of 40, when he was still known to a small circle in Paris and almost nobody outside it. He left out the eyebrows and the lashes, and gave the bald skull the same patient attention as the beard.