The apple of his eye

The critic and painter Adrian Stokes once remarked on how fortunate Cézanne had been to be bald, ‘considering the wonderful volume that he always achieved for the dome of his skull’. It’s a good joke, and all the better for being perfectly true — as is demonstrated by the superb sequence of self-portraits included in Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. These are the finest hairless craniums in the history of art.

That, however, is only one of the attractions of the exhibition. This is the most impressive array of work, by one of the greatest of all painters, to be seen in London in more than 20 years. Cézanne once said, ‘I paint as I see, as I feel — and I have very strong sensations.’ He makes us share them too.

You can absolutely sense how powerfully Cézanne perceived the roundness of his own head. The same is true of innumerable amazingly volumetric depictions of things in these pictures: the cylindrical coffee pot beside the ‘Woman with a Cafetière’ (c.1895),