Tête de vieillard (Old man head)

Ambroise Vollard bought this unfinished head straight from Cézanne and still had it when he died in July 1939. Early in the war his heir sold it to the dealer Martin Fabiani. From there it reached Elisabeth Pertl, mistress of Hermann Brandl, an SS officer who ran a German buying operation in occupied Paris, though some records say Brandl simply seized it. It was hidden in a Bavarian village, found there in 1949 and returned to France through the Allied collecting point in Munich. The French state has held it since as a recovered work, and in 2023 a Paris court turned down a claim for it from Vollard's heirs. The museum's title suggests, with a question mark, that the sitter is old Rouvel, father-in-law of the innkeeper at Bennecourt, where Cézanne spent the summer of 1866.