Self-Portrait with Beret and Spectacles

Pissarro painted himself only a handful of times, and three of those self-portraits came after he turned 65. This is the earliest of that late group, dated by the catalogue raisonné of his paintings to around 1896, the years when he was taking rooms in Rouen and Paris and painting the streets below his windows. The other two late self-portraits, one made in a Paris hotel over the winter of 1897 to 1898 and one in 1903, both put a window behind him with the city outside. Here there is no view at all. He fills the ground with rough strokes of red and sets against it a dark beret, wire spectacles, a long white beard and the collar of a brown coat, his head turned to glance back out of the picture. The canvas is small, about 35 by 32 centimetres, and it belongs to a private collection.