Cézanne’s Sitters

Cézanne’s prematurely balding head would become one of his signature motifs, described by the poet Rainer Marie Rilke in 1907 as a “powerful structure . . . formed as though by hammering from within.” The landscape in the background is a copy of a painting of the River Seine in the center of Paris by the impressionist artist Armand Guillaumin, with whom Cézanne shared a studio in the city at this time. Cézanne exhibited twice with the impressionists in the 1870s, and his encounters with those artists lightened both his palette and his handling of paint. Here Cézanne presented himself as an outsider to the refined world of Paris, with unruly hair and an unkempt beard.

For many of his canvases in the 1880s, Cézanne adopted a technique of applying similarly sized patches of paint in a parallel, usually diagonal direction across the canvas. This lively handling is especially visible here in the artist’s head, where it helps create a sense of volume that contrasts with the flatness of the wallpaper behind him.

This painting most likely served as a sketch for another, more fully finished portrait of the artist. It is the only time Cézanne showed himself wearing a bowler hat, even though it seems to have been his favorite headgear in his later years.

In his last self-portrait, Cézanne conveyed the effects of aging but projected a vivid presence beneath a soft beret. In his sixties and afflicted with diabetes, Cézanne nevertheless continued to paint on a daily basis, leaving remarkable evidence of his artistic vitality until the end.

The son of Italian immigrants, Louis-Auguste Cézanne was a formidable figure with a strong work ethic. Despite his initial reservations about Cézanne’s decision to become an artist rather than the lawyer Louis-August hoped for, he ultimately supported his son financially for years as he experimented with controversial art that found few buyers. Here the banker sits in a room at the family estate, “like a pope on his throne” in the words of a friend of Cézanne, reading a short-lived progressive journal infamous for its defense of avant-garde art.

Dominique Aubert was the younger brother of Cézanne’s mother.  A court bailiff who patiently indulged his nephew’s demands, he sometimes donned costumes for the series of ten portraits Cézanne painted of him in the fall of 1866. They are the first example of his painting the same subject in a series, a practice he would continue throughout his career.

Rapidly building up the face in his portraits of Dominique, Cézanne applied layer upon layer of pigment with a palette knife, a tool used for mixing paint, and left slabs of colors unmodulated, a deliberately crude technique he would call “ballsy.” A visiting friend described them as “mason’s painting,” suggesting they were composed with the confidence of a builder plastering a wall.

Although Dominique is recognizable from portrait to portrait, the paintings—like other series by Cézanne—are really more concerned with experimentation and technique than with conveying the inner life of an individual.    

Little is known about how Cézanne met Hortense Fiquet, a woman of humble origins who was born in a village in eastern France and moved to Paris in the mid-1850s when she was a small child. A talented dressmaker, the future Madame Cézanne probably made the elegant costume she wears here. Cézanne was clearly entranced by it, especially the shimmering striped skirt. The painting, with its symphony of brilliant colors, including patches of blue and green that model her face, was quite unlike any portrait before it.

The same armchair seen in the previous work appears in this later portrait of Madame Cézanne, which conveys a greater sense of solidity in the forms. Here the paint is applied thinly and loosely, with black outlines defining the clear contours of her schematic features, imparting a masklike effect.

Cézanne painted more portraits of Hortense than anyone else, including himself, some thirty in all. Seventeen are from the second half of the 1880s, around the time of their marriage. Many were painted in a series as he experimented with variations of pose and composition. Throughout the two decades Mme. Cézanne served as the artist’s principal subject, her facial features are seldom alike from portrait to portrait, and while her expressions vary, they are often masklike and difficult to interpret. Her appearance rarely embraces conventions of female portraiture, which has prompted speculation about the closeness of her relationship with her husband—especially because the couple frequently lived apart. Yet her portraits represent the most intense examination of a person Cézanne ever undertook. For an artist who said he could not bear to have anyone watching him paint, the hours Hortense spent in front of him suggest a profound intimacy.

Hortense sits in the elegant apartment in Paris Cézanne was able to rent after he inherited a considerable estate upon the death of his father. The chair railing tips down behind her, creating the startling effect of a tilting room. The addition of the edges of a mirror and fireplace with irons at left and a curtain at right sets off a further wave of motion—nothing, including Madame Cézanne on her chair, appears anchored within the space.

Cézanne drew his son frequently in sketchbooks and painted him a half-dozen or so times. In this, his last painted portrait of Paul, the teenager is dressed like an adult, though the jacket and hat, both slightly too small, suggest a youth still growing. Paul eventually acted as an agent for his father, who came to rely on him more than any other person.

This large, ambitious portrait, painted with a palette knife, was Cezanne’s first submission to the Salon, the state-sponsored annual exhibition in Paris that was essential for launching an artist’s reputation. The coarse handling and the sitter's apparent truculence, with his indirect gaze and clenched fists, offended the sensibilities of the jury, which rejected the canvas. One member accused the artist of painting it not just with a knife but with a pistol.

As an art critic and historian, Valabrègue wrote mainly about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Although he modeled for Cézanne for at least three portraits, he never quite understood his friend’s work. He confided to Zola in 1866: “Every time [Cézanne] paints one of his friends, it seems as though he were avenging himself for some hidden injury.”

In their youth, Marion and Cézanne made expeditions into the countryside to paint together and collect rock specimens. Cézanne's love of the landscape of Provence was clearly enhanced by their friendship.

The son of a cobbler, Louis Guillaume lived with his parents next to Cézanne in Paris in the early 1880s. The families were close—Louis and the younger Paul remained friends into adulthood—and the boy modeled for the artist on at least one other occasion, for a painting in which Paul also appeared. In this affectionate portrait Cézanne emphasized a rhythmic play of curves found in the streamlined arcs of eyes, brows, nose, and ears on the solidly formed, oval head, the lines of the wallpaper decoration to the right, and the back of a chair to the left.

This is the largest of four paintings that resulted from Cézanne’s studio sessions with a young model in Paris in the late 1880s, one of the few times he is known to have hired someone to pose for him. Both awkward and elegant, the boy is an adolescent not yet grown into his body, with the head of a child and the figure of a man. The massive curtain shifts between legibility as fabric and dissolution into pure shapes and touches of color, enlivening the picture by contrasting a sense of volume with the reality of paint on a flat canvas.

Chocquet was one of the most passionate advocates of impressionism. His distinguished collection of modern art included some thirty-five paintings by Cézanne, by far the largest single cache. Cézanne painted him several times, and this first portrait of him received much ridicule at the 1877 impressionist exhibition. To an audience used to refined portraits of dignified sitters, the casual presentation of a somewhat unkempt figure painted with thick strokes of barely mixed pigment was too jarring.

Here Cézanne experimented with a new kind of handling, building the composition through blocks of brilliant color. The accumulation of brushstrokes and repetition of patterns across the surface of the composition call as much attention to the carpet, furniture, and wallpaper as to Chocquet’s face. Cézanne emphasized the sitter’s equanimity and composure, which he felt lacking in himself, writing years later how he was “struck by [Chocquet’s] serenity . . . Fate has not endowed me with an equal stability.”

Geffroy was a great champion of the impressionists, especially Claude Monet, through whom he met Cézanne in 1894. Although Geffroy sat almost daily for three months for his portrait, Cézanne grew frustrated and stopped working on it, never fulfilling his promise to return to the face, which he considered unfinished. The setting, on the other hand, is one of the most elaborate of his portraits. Geffroy posed in his own apartment, with a plaster statuette by Auguste Rodin partly visible at far left. The sitter wrote of his portrait:  “in spite of its unfinished state, it is one of Cezanne’s most beautiful works . . . Everything is first rate . . . with incomparable harmony.  He had only sketched in the face and would always say, ‘We’ll leave that for the end.’ Sadly there was no end.”

Vollard was one of the most successful dealers in Paris from the late 1890s until his death in 1939, specializing in avant-garde art from Edgar Degas and Auguste Renoir to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. When he first met Cézanne after giving him his first solo exhibition in 1895, the artist still owned a substantial number of his paintings. Vollard eventually acquired most of them, as well as works on paper, making his fortune through their sales. Vollard’s memoir on his friendship with Cézanne (Paris 1914) is the source of many stories about the artist. This painting provided one of the most famous anecdotes about his portrait practice: During one of the numerous sessions (115 according to Vollard), Cézanne groused at his sitter to remain motionless while he painstakingly applied one patch of color after another: “You wretch! You've spoiled the pose! Do I have to tell you again to sit like an apple? Does an apple move?” Cézanne never finished the painting. He did tell his dealer, however, that he was “not displeased” with the shirtfront.

The plain face, no-nonsense costume, and large, rough hands evocative of manual labor do nothing to diminish the stately presence of this unknown woman from Aix. She is one of the few subjects whom Cézanne placed in a well-defined environment: the coffee press and cup resting on an oilcloth-covered table point to a kitchen, most likely in the Cézanne family house. An emphasis on geometrical shapes—her pyramidal body, the cylindrical cafetière and cup, the rectangular panels of doors—is tempered by softer passages such as the wallpaper of cascading flowers.

In the 1890s Cézanne had several workers from his family estate pose for him, both for individual portraits such as this one and for his celebrated series of cardplayers. Paulin Paulet was a gardener who appears in three variations of this composition in which he sits alone at a table. Here it slants downward, even as it props up the figure leaning into it. Such spatial ambiguities would leave a strong impression on modernist painters in the early twentieth century.

Like Paulet, this worker also appears in Cézanne’s cardplayer series, recognizable by his hat and lanky body. The earth tones and rugged handling conjure up the soil in which he labored.

This farmworker is seated at Cézanne’s family home in Aix in front of a painted screen the artist had decorated as a young man. Joachim Gasquet (1873–1921), a writer from Aix and friend of the artist, mentioned this portrait in a description of a visit to Cézanne's studio. There he saw “some canvases in which sturdy peasants . . . gain a respite from their work. One especially in his blue smock, adorned with his red scarf, arms dangling, is admirable in his ruggedness, as if incarnated as this massive and magnificent flesh, baked by the sun and buffeted by the wind.”

Cézanne’s son referred to this sitter from Aix as “the clock maker.” Certainly his necktie (here barely suggested but prominent in another portrait of the man), waistcoat, and long hair are more in keeping with an artisan than the rougher appearance of local peasants. The mystery of this painting extends beyond the man’s identity, however, to the melancholic gaze of his oddly angled face, the strange treatment of his disjointed left hand and sleeve, and the truncation of his right hand to a thumb. The man’s expression and sideways glance, together with the emphatic gesture of his crossed arms and the painting’s muddied tones, convey a moodiness that sets the portrait apart.

The symmetry of this monumental, pyramidal figure is reinforced by the walking stick standing parallel to the central axis of the sitter. The aging man’s strangely disproportionate body and gigantic hands have no precedent in Cézanne’s work, and nothing like them would appear again.

Though her identity is still debated, the woman here may well be the artist’s sister Marie, with whom he remained close his entire life. The tone of the portrait is strikingly dark, not only in hue but in emotion. Cézanne has presented a melancholic vision of aging, as the woman slumps with cloudy eyes and downcast mouth, the dress bunched bulkily around her.

In 1902 Cézanne moved into a new studio at Les Lauves, in the hills north of Aix with a panoramic view of the countryside he often painted. There his elderly gardener, known today only by his last name, Vallier, posed for him both indoors and in the open air. The portraits of Vallier made on the terrace of the Lauves studio are filled with light. The paint was thinly applied, allowing the luminosity of the white canvas to shine through, and Cézanne left some areas of canvas unpainted to further lighten the effect, which compares to Cézanne’s landscapes of the period.

Cézanne must have painted this portrait of his gardener in cold weather, for Vallier is dressed warmly in a wool coat and heavy cap that shadows his aging face with its sunken cheeks. The surfaces of the indoor portraits of Vallier, some of the darkest and densest paintings of Cézanne’s career, are encrusted with layers of paint that hint at the obsessive, arduous labor of their creation.