Paul Cezanne - Self-portrait with pink background Notebook

Self-Portrait with a Pink Background (Portrait de l'artiste au fond rose), painted around 1875 in oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne. The artist's dark hair and beard stand against a warm pink background, creating a compact image built from strong contrasts of flesh, hair and surrounding colour. Cézanne keeps the pose direct and unsentimental, allowing visible brushwork to describe the face rather than smoothing it into a conventional likeness. Scholars have noted stylistic and compositional connections with Camille Pissarro’s 1873 self-portrait and his 1874 portrait of Cézanne; Cézanne’s pose also resembles an etching Pissarro made of him around the same time. The unusual pink ground makes this self-portrait especially distinctive within Cézanne's repeated studies of his own face. The painting later belonged to Auguste Pellerin, one of Cézanne’s major early collectors, and was shown in the artist’s important posthumous Salon d’Automne retrospective in 1907.