Still Life with Bread and Eggs

Cézanne painted this in 1865, when he was 26 and still working in dark, heavy tones, years before he found the bright touch we now think of as his. A loaf, some eggs, red onions, and a pewter jug, all pushed close to the front of a plain table. For more than 150 years that was the whole story. Then, in 2022, conservators in Cincinnati looked beneath the surface and found another painting underneath, a figure turned toward us in the pose of a portrait, very likely Cézanne himself. He had simply reused the canvas, laying his bread and eggs straight over his own face. The blunt, palette-knife thickness of the paint here belongs to his earliest, roughest years.