What could also be Paul Cézanne’s earliest dated portrait has been found beneath the layers of paint that make up Nonetheless Life with Bread and Eggs (1865), an image within the assortment of the Cincinnati Artwork Museum. Whereas inspecting that portray not too long ago, the museum’s chief conservator Serena Urry seen cracking of the paint floor that urged one other picture could also be hid beneath. An x-ray confirmed her suspicions, revealing a portrait of a male determine—maybe even a self-portrait.
As a result of it lies beneath one in every of Cézanne’s few dated nonetheless lifes—made when the artist was in his mid-twenties and dealing in a realist type, earlier than creating his distinctive strategy to Submit-Impressionist figuration—the portrait is probably going one in every of his earliest dated portraits. It exhibits a male sitter rendered in a three-quarter view. Particulars similar to the color of his garments and different options could also be gleaned from additional scientific evaluation, together with x-ray fluorescence mapping and multi-spectral imaging. “This may end in a publication and probably an exhibition, as we search to disclose as a lot as we will about this necessary, long-hidden portrait,” Peter Jonathan Bell, the museum’s curator of European work, sculpture and drawings, mentioned in an announcement.
Paul Cézanne, Nonetheless Life with Bread and Eggs, 1865 Courtesy Cincinnati Artwork Museum
The examination that led to Urry’s discovery got here after the deinstallation of the museum’s exhibition One Every: Nonetheless Lifes by Cézanne, Pissarro and Associates earlier this yr. “Serena had a superb hunch,” Bell provides. “We’re fortunate it got here into the lab when it did, as a result of instinct like that may solely come from in depth expertise with historic work and deep understanding of the working strategies of Nineteenth-century artists, each of which she has in spades.”
Reusing canvases and portray over earlier compositions has lengthy been a standard follow for painters, and scientific evaluation of works by Fashionable artists particularly routinely turns up earlier and deserted works. Earlier this yr, for instance, x-ray evaluation revealed a Vincent van Gogh self-portrait lurking on the again of one in every of his work of a peasant and a trio of sketches beneath one in every of Amedeo Modigliani’s earliest nudes. Trying into the layers of work may shed new gentle on artists’ working strategies: evaluation of an Artemesia Gentileschi portray of St Catherine of Alexandria by the Gallerie degli Uffizi in 2019 confirmed that the determine in it sported a turban in an earlier model of the image.
Nonetheless Life with Bread and Eggs, one in every of two Cézanne work within the Cincinnati Artwork Museum’s assortment, will return on public show on 20 December. Urry added, “We went from having two Cézannes to 3 with this discovery.”
