About this work
The designation "Self Portrait 6" is a cataloguing or print-series convention used by some art print retailers to distinguish individual works within Cézanne's extensive body of self-portraits (he produced over thirty). It does not correspond to a universally agreed scholarly numbering. Based on the visual and contextual evidence available — including the Artchive entry on the Phillips Collection work (1878–80), the National Gallery London's c.1880–1 self-portrait, and related scholarship — this description is written for the well-documented group of Cézanne's mature self-portraits from around 1878–1881, which share a consistent composition, palette, and context, and are the most commonly reproduced in fine art print series under sequential titles.
Cézanne confronts the viewer with an almost geological directness. This three-quarter bust-level portrait represents the painter in his early forties , his heavy-lidded gaze fixed forward with neither warmth nor hostility — simply attention. His hair reaches his collar, his neck hides behind his clothing and messy beard, a hint of mouth just visible beneath the mustache; little skin shows. He models his ruddy, blotchy face and large, balding head in short, unblended brushstrokes built up to a thick impasto.
A very reduced color palette and a diagonal running from the right shoulder to the upper corner of the canvas form two opposing fields of light and dark, with the painter's sharp eyes positioned at the precise point of their most intense collision.
The background, sparse in detail, carries geometric elements that provide structural balance; the brushwork is lively yet controlled, contributing to the portrait's dynamic yet inward atmosphere.
Cézanne was around forty years old when he painted this self-portrait in Paris, and the intensity of his earlier self-portraits had by this point given way to a more distant and reflective presence.
It was a significant period: he had stopped exhibiting with the Impressionist group after 1879 and was spending more time in the south of France, away from the capital.
His self-portraits from this period mark a clear change in direction — he distances himself from the Impressionists and introduces what would become his signature "constructive brushstroke" technique.
This involved using ordered, similarly sized parallel brushstrokes to create a sense of volume.
Of the more than thirty self-portraits from Cézanne's hand, they are not only documents of his appearance across four decades but indicators of a continued self-concern surprising in an artist of classic tendency.
The literal edifice of paint serves as a kind of defense, behind which his sharp eyes peer out — it is the psychological guardedness of this man, otherwise so candid about his appearance, that makes the
