Self-Portrait with a Beret

Cézanne sits in a dark coat and an exceptionally broad beret. His head turns toward the right side of the picture, but his eyes seem to stop short of meeting ours. A pale beard and collar interrupt the dark figure, while a curved flash of red rises behind his shoulder. The painting is Self-Portrait with a Beret .

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, holds this painting as accession 1972.950. The online catalogue raisonné identifies it as FWN 529 and dates it 1898–1900. ^[1]

A face held between two dark shapes

The beret is almost a horizontal roof. Its brim bends upward over the sitter’s right ear, while the opposite edge projects well beyond his temple. This breadth changes the proportions of the portrait: the face is a narrow, illuminated passage between a heavy cap and a heavy coat. The cap is not uniformly black. Brown, violet and grey marks disturb its surface, and a lighter stroke along its upper edge keeps it from becoming a single flat patch.

Below the hat, warm paint crosses the forehead and cheeks in small shifts. Around the eye nearest the centre, an orange-red surround makes the pale eye seem more exposed. The nose has a cool ridge beside warmer planes. The moustache and beard do not make one smooth white triangle: grey, cream and dark interruptions break the shape into several angled passages. One can follow the head by these colour decisions even where no continuous outline secures it.

Theodore Reff, writing for the 1977 Cézanne: The Late Work exhibition, identified touches of violet, crimson and orange in the modelling of this face. He took their complexity, along with the sitter’s apparent age, as support for a late date despite affinities in the blue coat and cap with portraits from earlier in the 1890s. That is an argument from the handling of this canvas, not a precise record of a sitting. ^[3]

Cézanne places the white collar and beard near the centre, where they act almost like a hinge. The collar points downward into the coat; the beard points back up toward the mouth and eyes. The dark coat, meanwhile, is mottled with warm and cool strokes rather than carefully described as fabric. Its left edge is clear against the ground, but its interior is turbulent. The coat gives the sitter weight without providing much information about tailoring or social role.

The chair and the space behind him

Only part of the armchair enters the canvas. The red appears at lower right as a curved field, cut off by the frame and partly hidden by the figure. It is enough to tell us he is seated, but too little to map the whole chair or room. Against the muted ground and deep coat, that red has unusual leverage: even a small area of it can pull the eye away from the face and then send it back.

The wall or setting does not resolve into a named place. Behind the cap, thin changes of grey, cream and greenish colour remain visible. Around the shoulders the ground has a rougher, rubbed appearance, with strokes that appear to brush against the figure’s contour. The space therefore feels shallow without becoming a simple blank backdrop. Cézanne lets the head stand apart in value, while leaving the edges open to the surrounding paint.

John Rewald’s entry in the 1977 MoMA catalogue proposed that the red chair might be the one seen in earlier portraits of Hortense Fiquet and the artist’s son. He also thought a Paris-area setting probable, given Cézanne’s stays there in 1898 and 1899 and the apparent history of that chair. Both points remain proposals; the painting does not document a particular room or prove that the chairs are identical. ^[4]

The reproduced image shows uneven density of colour. The coat can appear open and porous where brown and blue strokes cross, while the face is worked through finer changes. That contrast gives the head definition without making the clothes disappear.

A late self-portrait, with an uncertain day

The catalogue’s 1898–1900 range accommodates differing earlier opinions, from Reff’s 1898 to proposals around 1901 or 1902. A photograph in Vollard’s archive was annotated “1898” by Cézanne’s son. Such an annotation is evidence for the early end of the range, although it is not a date painted on the canvas. ^[1]

The painting belongs among the last self-portraits. More recent portrait exhibitions have presented it as the final one. ^[5]

There is no brush or palette in the image. Cézanne identifies himself through his face, not through the equipment of painting. The vast beret may suggest an artist’s costume to a modern viewer, but the picture gives no written key to that choice. Its stronger statement is pictorial: an asymmetrical cap casts the head into an unusual shape, while the shoulder and chair answer it with other broad curves.

Machotka, in a passage reproduced by the Société Cézanne, read the raised brows and withdrawn gaze as signs of diminished physical energy. He then shifted attention to the repeated arcs of cap, eyes, collar, shoulder and chair, arguing that the composition carries a vigour the sitter seems to lack. This is a thoughtful interpretation of visible forms, though the expression cannot establish Cézanne’s health or state of mind. ^[6]

The National Portrait Gallery likewise noted competing responses to the late image: viewers have seen both frailty and resolve. The National Gallery of Art’s 2018 exhibition account called the figure prematurely aged yet vehement. Such language describes a tension in the portrait, not a medical finding. The eyes may appear tired, but the firm sweep of the hat and the concentrated passages around the face resist a purely passive reading. ^{[5] [7]}

From Vollard to Boston

The documented ownership runs from the dealer Ambroise Vollard to collector Egisto Fabbri, then through Paul Rosenberg to Robert Treat Paine in Boston. It descended through Paine’s family before entering the Museum of Fine Arts in 1972 as a purchase and partial gift from Elizabeth Paine Metcalf. The sequence charts how a seemingly private self-examination entered a public collection through international dealing and American collecting. ^[8]

Exhibition labels varied: Venice in 1920 used 1898, New York in 1929 about 1880, and Philadelphia in 1934 about 1890. The current late date is a researched conclusion. ^[1]

The work featured in MoMA’s Cézanne: The Late Work in 1977 and in Cézanne Portraits in 2017–18. Each setting invites a different question: how it belongs to the final decade, and how it stands within a lifetime of representing faces. Neither frame exhausts it. The spare furniture, uneven paint and small red counterweight remain more specific than a simple label such as “last portrait.” ^{[9] [7]}