Description
Bread and Eggs – a painting with another painting under it
On a dark table lie a long loaf, two white eggs, red onions, a pewter tankard, a glass of wine and a black-handled knife; from the right a white cloth falls over the edge. The background is almost black. The canvas measures 59 × 76 cm and dates from 1865 – at the lower left the painter wrote his name and the year in red. It is held by the Cincinnati Art Museum (inv. 1955.73). With us the painter makes it himself: a hand-painted painting on canvas, in oil, densely laid on.
What lies under the surface
In 2022 the museum, imaging beneath the surface, discovered that Cézanne painted this still life over an earlier portrait – in all likelihood a self-portrait. Because the still life is itself signed and dated 1865, the buried portrait must be from that year or before, which makes it one of the earliest known portraits by Cézanne. The museum stays careful and speaks of a possible self-portrait rather than a settled fact, and we do not claim it as certain either. The canvas you see therefore carries the painter’s own face beneath it.
Cézanne before the light arrived
This is the early Cézanne, who appears nowhere else on our shelf: dark, heavy, painted in a thick and almost coarse layer. It belongs to the dozen or so canvases of the 1860s known as his dark period, and it leans on Spanish and Flemish Baroque still life – the tradition in which objects step out of the darkness and shine only where the light strikes them. Almost everything separates it from the later, bright still lifes except the seriousness.
Bread, eggs, onion
The choice of food is not accidental. Bread, eggs and onion are the cheapest and most everyday things a kitchen holds – the exact opposite of the lavish fruit still life. Cézanne gives them weight: the loaf is as solid as a beam, the eggs are smooth and closed, the onion carries the only colour. The wine glass stands among them as the one pale vertical and holds the scene upright.
Because the canvas is mostly dark, it works best on a light wall and in a room where it is not competing with other paintings – a dining room, a kitchen or a study. The fifteen sizes begin at 55 × 43 cm and end at 180 × 140 cm; for a measurement in between we stretch it to a custom size. How it looks framed is shown by our 3D preview application. Among our reproductions on canvas, The Abduction and Afternoon in Naples come from the same early years, while Still Life with a Dessert offers the comparison with his later manner.
- Subject: Bread and Eggs, Paul Cézanne, 1865, Cincinnati Art Museum (1955.73)
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: an earlier portrait hides beneath the still life, found only in 2022
