Bodegón con pan y huevos

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.