Self-Portrait

By 1880 Cezanne had more or less stopped showing with the Impressionists. He'd appeared in their exhibitions in 1874 and 1877, been mocked by the Paris critics, then pulled back to work on his own in the south. This self-portrait comes from those withdrawn years. He gives himself a high bald forehead and a heavy beard, and looks off to the side rather than at you. The striking thing is that he builds the head the way he built his apples and his mountains, in small firm patches of tone, one plane set against the next, so the face feels constructed rather than flattered. There's no attempt to charm. He painted himself something like 26 times, studying his own features as coolly as he studied everything else. It hangs today in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, bought before the First World War by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin.