Cezanne: The Self Portraits

Like Rembrandt, Cezanne also inserted his own image into narrative paintings, in particular a deeply revealing series from the late 1860s and 1870s. By his final years Cezanne had quelled the exuberant Romanticism of his youthful temperament. His self-portraits now show a spirit of introspection and scepticism that was very much in tune with the Symbolist mood of the times. These works are also, finally, serene and magisterial, depicting a man who, despite the doubts that never left him, had seen his aesthetic path and was unfailingly committed to it.