Self-Portrait with a Hat

Paul Cézanne turns back towards us from the left edge of this portrait. His shoulders continue away, but his eye catches the viewer sideways beneath a soft, broad-brimmed hat. The face, beard and coat are built with different kinds of paint: warm, compact strokes across the cheek; cool blue-grey around the jaw; broken ochres and greens across the heavy sleeve.

The Artizon Museum calls the work Self-Portrait with a Hat and dates it to about 1890–94. The online catalogue raisonné identifies this particular canvas as FWN 511 and dates it 1894. ^{[1] [2]}

A glance over the shoulder

The turn gives the portrait its immediate drama. The coat occupies almost the whole lower left of the canvas, a dark, sloping mass that implies the body faces away from us. Yet the head rotates far enough to bring the cheek into the light. Cézanne does not place two eyes evenly before the viewer: one is clearly visible under the brim, while the other side of the face recedes. That imbalance makes the act of looking feel momentary, as if the painter has paused during another movement.

At close range, the right edge of the beard does more than describe facial hair. Its blue-grey strokes lead down from the ear to the pointed lower jaw, then meet the raised coat collar. Warm orange paint across the nose and cheek lies against this cooler area. The eye itself is small, dark and sharply bounded; much of the expression comes from the tilt of the head and the contrast of light around it.

Pavel Machotka, writing specifically about this canvas, compares its viewpoint with earlier self-portraits and notices that the head turns farther away while the eye looks more obliquely back. He suggests suspicion as one possible impression, then cautions that the work need not be read chiefly as a disclosure of mood. His closer concern is how freely placed marks can still hold the head and torso together. ^[3]

The museum’s description proposes melancholy in the shadowed side and stern self-awareness in the lit one. ^[1] Both readings respond to the picture; neither is a documented statement by Cézanne.

Hat, wall and painted surface

The hat is irregular rather than smoothly outlined. A dark band and brim cut across the forehead; the crown rises in a muted green-grey, with a brown patch projecting at the far left. The outline seems to fold into the background near the top. Below it, the ear glows almost copper-orange, one of the strongest colour notes in the whole painting. These relationships keep the eye circulating between the hat and face, even though the coat takes up more space.

The wall is active too. Mauve-brown islands hang at the right of the head, while grey-green and yellowish areas spread between them. A horizontal dark band near the bottom briefly gives that shifting field a firm boundary. Near the left edge and in the coat, lighter flecks interrupt the dark paint. The surface looks worked and open at once: dense passages exist beside thin or unpainted ones. There is no need to decide whether each light patch is fabric, reflection or bare ground to notice the rhythm it gives the figure.

Machotka reads the dark marks around the hat and beard as a continuation of the jaw’s diagonal, helping to balance the weight of the torso; he also identifies the background pattern as wallpaper. ^[3] Seen independently, the patches do work as counterweights: the face projects into the relatively open right half, but the darker forms prevent that half becoming empty. The viewer is drawn back and forth across a deliberately uneven composition.

Artizon likewise notes green as an underlying colour and the coexistence of assertive brushwork with areas left unpainted. ^[1]

The picture thus has two different kinds of precision. The edges of the eye, nose and beard make the head legible; the loose surroundings stop it from becoming an isolated likeness pasted onto a neutral backdrop. The lower horizontal strip is especially useful in this regard. It locates a background plane behind the shoulder while the mottled upper field continues to unsettle easy depth. Cézanne lets the portrait be both a recognizable person and a negotiation among coloured shapes.

Where it sits among the self-portraits

Cézanne repeatedly used his own face as a subject, and the National Portrait Gallery’s survey makes the change in his approach visible across several decades. Its account moves from an early, dramatically lit likeness to a lighter portrait of the 1870s, then to more regularly placed strokes in an 1880–81 painting. It also distinguishes the bowler-hat portraits of the mid-1880s from a late self-portrait with a beret. ^[4] The Artizon painting belongs within this sequence, but its soft hat, turned torso and open, blotched background make it a distinct solution.

The current catalogue dates the canvas 1894 and notes a Vollard archival photograph annotated with that year. It also records earlier variations in Venturi’s and Rewald’s datings. ^[2]

From Vollard to the Armory Show

The catalogue traces the canvas through Vollard, Alphonse Kann, Bernheim-Jeune and back to Vollard. It lists the painting in Vollard’s Paris Cézanne exhibition of November–December 1895. ^[2]

In 1913 the work was exhibited in New York’s International Exhibition of Modern Art, the Armory Show, as Portrait de Cézanne , lent by Vollard. The original exhibition catalogue gives it number 215. ^[5]

The catalogue raisonné records its onward presentation in Chicago and Boston. ^[2]

An early Cézanne in Japan

The catalogue places the work with Moritatsu Hosokawa in Tokyo by December 1920, after an uncertain entry for Masanosuke Soma in Paris. It later passed to Shojiro Ishibashi and the Bridgestone Museum of Art. ^[2]

Shigemi Inaga identifies this self-portrait as one of two Cézanne oils in the first Shirakaba Museum exhibition in 1921. His article reproduces the painting alongside a photograph of writer Mushanokōji Saneatsu with it. He places that encounter within an earlier Japanese engagement with Cézanne through writing and reproduced images, followed by opportunities to see originals. ^[6] The portrait’s move to Japan therefore altered what it could offer: a canvas whose broken touches and reserved areas could be inspected directly, rather than inferred from a printed page.

A later record supplies another physical trace. The Tokyo National Research Institute for Cultural Properties lists a glass-plate photograph of the hat self-portrait made in June 1932, when the owner was Hosokawa; its present-owner field names the Bridgestone Museum. ^[7] That record does not tell us how visitors responded. It does show that the painting was being documented as an individual object within Japan, decades before the Artizon name appeared.

Artizon places the 1921 Shirakaba exhibition in Kyobashi, now the museum’s district. Its curator recalls that Kawakami Ryoka admired Cézanne but was too ill to see the works. ^[8]