Portrait de l'artiste (Self-portrait)

Painted c.1877 and now kept in the art depot of Hohenzollern Castle, this early self-portrait belongs to a formative period when Cézanne was working between Paris and Aix while still feeling the influence of Impressionism. By this date he had submitted repeatedly to the Salon and been rejected; the 1874 and 1876 Impressionist exhibitions had shown his work to mixed and often hostile response. The self-portraits of the 1870s document his psychological state as a painter under criticism, as well as the evolution of his technique away from the romantic, heavily impastoed manner of his early career toward the more analytical approach of his maturity.

The 1877 self-portrait shows Cézanne's technique in transition: the palette has lightened from his dark early manner, and the brushwork is beginning to organise itself into the patch-like parallel strokes of his mature style. The face is still modelled with some conventional tonal gradation, but the analytical fragmentation of form into colour planes is already visible in the forehead and cheekbones.