Self-Portrait with Palette

Cézanne painted this around 1890, working in near isolation down in Provence, still about five years short of the Paris show that would finally make his name. He gives himself the same treatment he gave his apples and Mont Sainte-Victoire. The palette is a hard flat slab laid straight across the front of the picture, the body behind it built from a few broad planes, and his right hand, the painting hand, is hidden behind the edge of the canvas he is working on. The result is a figure assembled plane by plane, closer to one of his still lifes than to a portrait. The picture stayed in the family, first his son and then his widow, until 1953, when the Zurich arms manufacturer Emil Bührle bought it.