Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat

Cézanne painted himself many times, usually with a bald severity, so the straw hat here reads almost against type. He made this small canvas around 1878, in his late 30s, at a point when he had drifted away from his Impressionist friends in Paris and was working mostly alone in Provence. You can already see the method that would occupy the rest of his life: he builds the head from separate, slightly angular patches of colour set side by side, each a small decision about form, so the face feels constructed as much as observed. The hat, the beard and the jacket are handled with the same deliberate, patch-by-patch touch, on a canvas not much larger than a sheet of writing paper.