Description
Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat – the other hat
The painter has shown himself almost frontally, the head slightly turned. On it sits a broad straw hat laid in a strong yellow, its brim falling at the right and a darker band running round the crown. A thick brown beard covers the jaw and most of the mouth, and the eyes look to the left. The lower third is filled by a very dark green-black coat. Behind him stands a pale olive wall carrying large, softly drawn floral shapes. The canvas measures 34.9 × 28.9 cm, was made in 1878 and 1879 and is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
Two hats, sixteen years apart
You know this face already – it is worn by the Self-Portrait with a Soft Hat too, except that there the painter is fifty-five and wears a soft felt hat. Here he is thirty-nine or forty, the beard is still brown rather than grey, and the headgear is straw. Two canvases, the same man, sixteen years between them – and it is the headgear by which you tell them apart at a glance. The catalogue raisonné files both under the same heading.
The wallpaper behind the head
The wall behind the painter is not empty: large, softly drawn floral shapes run across it, which the catalogue lists among the motifs as a floral wallpaper. The same pattern, from the same years, stands behind the fruit of Milk Can and Apples as well – there we stayed with the wallpaper longer; here let it be enough that the ground of this portrait is a room, not a studio cloth.
A work that does not reach its own edge
On all four sides the paint stops before it reaches the margin: a band of bare canvas is left standing round the image, widest at the left and along the bottom. The work is therefore visibly a piece of cloth, with the image set in the middle rather than drawn out to the end. How the painter handles the uncovered priming inside the image as well is told more precisely by Poplars. The dating of this work is, incidentally, unusually scattered: Rewald places it in 1878-1879, while the painter’s son – who was also its first known owner – wrote “circa 1883” on Vollard’s archive photograph.
Because the original is small, this canvas reads differently at large sizes than it does in the museum: strokes that are fine there become broad fields of yellow and dark green here. It therefore works well as a single piece on a narrow wall, in a hallway or between bookshelves. Because the canvas is upright, the smallest size begins at 41 × 50 cm and the largest measures 149 × 180 cm. Intermediate measurements we stretch to custom size on the stretcher frame, and how it will look framed is shown by our 3D rendering application. Among our art paintings on canvas this is one of the painter’s two faces.
- Subject: Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, Paul Cézanne, 1878-1879, Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the same face under a different hat returns sixteen years later
