Автопортрет в мягкой шляпе

Cezanne left behind about 30 self-portraits, and he studied his own face with the same slow patience he gave to apples and to the mountain near his home. This one, from 1894, shows him in a soft felt hat with a palette in hand. By then he was 55 and mostly working alone, away from the Paris crowd, his reputation still a rumour among younger painters rather than a public fact. Look at how the face is built. He puts it together from small planes of colour, one patch set beside the next, so the head feels constructed rather than drawn. He painted it around the time he spent a season at Giverny, where Monet brought him together with the writer Clemenceau and the sculptor Rodin, company the famously solitary Cezanne mostly kept at arm's length.