Self-Portrait in the Form of a Grotesque Head (Pot anthropomorphe)

1889

Glazed stoneware, height 28.4 cm. Musée d'Orsay, Paris

A glazed jar is modeled as a human head, its face bowed and brooding. The museum classes it as a domestic pot, but a label he attached names it The Sincerity of a Dream.

The group's taste for simplified form carries over into clay. The features are reduced to a few heavy masses rather than worked into a detailed likeness.
It was a gift to the painter Émile Schuffenecker, named on the label under the base.
Look at the half-shut eyes and the hand pressed up under the chin.
The glaze pools and streaks over the face, leaving the surface uneven.
It was given to the Louvre in 1938 and later passed to the Orsay.

The label salutes this fellow painter as an idealist. He kept the pot until 1934, and it then passed through his family.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain