Portrait de l'artiste au fond rose

Painted c.1875 and held at the Musée d'Orsay, this early self-portrait with its distinctive warm rose-pink background stands at the beginning of Cézanne's deliberate break from his dark, romantic early manner. The pink ground is unusual in his self-portrait series and may reflect the influence of Impressionist colour experimentation he was absorbing through contact with Pissarro and the Impressionist circle. By 1875 Cézanne had participated in the first Impressionist exhibition and was beginning to formulate his own post-Impressionist vision — though that term would not be coined until 1910.

The warm background — applied in thin, even strokes of rose and pale orange — creates an unusual colouristic atmosphere that contrasts with the cooler tones of the face. Cézanne's brushwork here is already more considered than his early palette-knife canvases, with colour patches beginning to modulate form systematically. The treatment of beard and hair shows the parallel directional strokes of his emerging mature method.