Self-portraits

The river view behind Cézanne's head is somebody else's painting. It is a view of the Seine in Paris made in 1871 by his friend Armand Guillaumin, a fellow painter, and Cézanne probably painted himself in Guillaumin's studio. He worked from a mirror, so the landscape appears in reverse. That fixes the earliest possible date, and specialists still argue about the rest. John Rewald, who catalogued Cézanne's paintings, preferred about 1875, while the British painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing argued for 1872. The face is built from dabs of orange, pink and grey under a bald crown, framed by a bushy dark beard. In 1947 the collector Jacques Laroche gave the picture to the French state on condition that he could keep it, and it moved to the Louvre's Jeu de Paume gallery in 1969, when he gave up that right.