Self-Portrait

This self-portrait is small, about 25 centimetres tall, a quick head and shoulders in a pale smock against a blue-green ground, usually dated around 1877. What gives it weight is the list of people who kept it. From the dealer Ambroise Vollard it went to Camille Pissarro, the older painter who had worked beside Cézanne at Pontoise, and then to the novelist and critic Octave Mirbeau, whose collection was auctioned in 1919. In November 1941, with Paris under German occupation, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne bought it from a Paris dealer. After the war it came back to France and into the care of the national museums. Its whereabouts between 1933 and 1945 are not fully traced, so the Musée d'Orsay holds it on behalf of any owner who might come forward, with the letters MNR in its inventory number.