Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) is best known for his luminous landscapes of the valleys and majestic mountains of his native Provence and for his elaborate still lifes of apples, pears, and pottery balanced on sumptuous tablecloths. He imbued these paintings with a monumental permanence and coherence that paved the way for the modern art of Matisse and Picasso. Less well known: Cézanne also painted portraits, 160 of them. Though radically unconventional by the standards of the day, these are among his finest works. The first full-scale exhibition of these portraits, after stops in Paris and London, is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, the curators argue that portraiture is the most personal, and therefore most human, aspect of Cézanne’s work.
The extent and depth of Cézanne’s achievement in portraiture is revealed through nearly 60 examples. Walking through the galleries we meet the people of his life over five decades, seeing them through his eyes: his father and relatives, his wife, their son, a few notable supporters, and the working-class men and women of his homeland.
As we enter the first gallery, a dapper, brooding young man glares out at us: The earliest of Cézanne’s self-portraits in the exhibition dates to the early 1860s. While that painting was made with a brush, other early portraits—like those of his mother, sister, and uncle—were painted with a palette knife. He later described this unorthodox technique, inspired by Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, as his manière couillarde (“ballsy manner”). As Courbet and Manet did, Cézanne ensured that his painterly performance was going to be noticed as much as his subject.
In the exhibition’s earliest true masterpiece, the National Gallery’s own The Artist’s Father (1866), Cézanne comes to terms with his republican paterfamilias Louis-Auguste, a self-made businessman and successful banker who wanted his son to become a lawyer. At first blush this monumental tribute to the man whose grudging financial support made the painter’s artistic career possible is properly respectful. His father sits in his easy chair, relaxing at home in his slippers and cap and reading the paper.
Yet as is almost always the case with Cézanne, the picture is as much about him as his father. One of his bold still lifes hangs on the wall right above his father’s head; to the right there is a view into his studio; and in his father’s hands, he places not the conservative newspaper Louis-Auguste would have read but the left wing L’Événement, for which his boyhood friend the novelist Émile Zola penned a spirited and controversial defense of the new painting.
Cézanne was the most classically educated painter of his generation, so fluent in Latin and Greek that he would translate Virgil or Lucretius on the trains to and from Paris. Yet this shy and insecure young man affected a boorish rustic manner in his personal demeanor during these visits. In a self-portrait from 1875 (pictured atop this review), he’s a wild man—a solitary, uncouth, glaring peasant with greasy hair massed on either side of his head. During this period, Cézanne was painting outdoors side by side with the older impressionist Camille Pissarro. He learned how to capture the transient effects of light and atmosphere, but Impressionism presented an especially difficult challenge for portraiture. How to shape a palpable human presence using the styles and techniques intended to record a continuous, ever-changing visual field?
In one solution from 1875, Cézanne celebrates the powerful volume and structure of his bald head—one of the most fortunate cases of early baldness in the history of art. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was transfixed by this painting when he saw it in 1907, memorably writing that the head seemed “formed as though by hammering from within.” Hammered from within nicely characterizes the self-discipline that must have been at work for the artist to have produced the canvases to follow.
Cézanne had been living with his partner Hortense Fiquet since 1869. This liaison, which produced a beloved son Paul three years later, was also fortunate for his art. A dressmaker with a sharp eye for fashion, Hortense had an oval face that Cézanne loved to paint. She would become not only his wife (in 1886), but also his most frequent subject, painted more than two dozen times and sketched endlessly during their years together.
In what the curators describe as a milestone in the history of painting, Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (ca. 1877), Hortense wears a blue robe de promenade that she probably designed. The intimacy in this painting emerges not, as one might expect, from eye contact between sitter and viewer but from the brilliant color and responsive brushstrokes lavished on Hortense’s ensemble. There is a palpable delight in the way Cézanne paints the ribbons of her blouse and makes her skirt shimmer. Sitting on her own plush throne of a red armchair, Hortense is a daunting goddess. This is a noble tribute from one artist to another.
The exhibition also brings together four later canvases showing his wife in a red dress (1888-1890), made during what was apparently a rare period of stability in their relationship. The differences among these four paintings—in Hortense’s face, her hands, the shadows—reveal variations in Cézanne’s technique and approach to psychological depiction.
In Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1888-90), Cézanne offers another kind of homage, this time to the great tradition of Italian High Renaissance portraiture that he studied at the Louvre and also to the golden age of adolescence that had been the happiest period of his life. The painting shows a young man—this was one of the few times Cézanne used a professional model—standing with languid elegance, his weight shifted to one side and his hand on his tilted hip. The swagger of confidence shown by the boy’s pose is in tension with the sweet, pensive look on his face. With the head of a child and the body of a man, the subject’s presence is, in the words of one of the curators, “simultaneously elegant and awkward, vital and relaxed, physically imposing and contemplative, even melancholic.” As in most of his finest portraits, Cézanne has largely displaced emotional expression from the conventional site of the face to the overall formal elements of color, shape, and composition.
In 1895, after decades of neglect or derision, Cézanne received his first solo exhibition and a highly sympathetic review from the critic Gustave Geffroy. In gratitude, Cézanne offered to paint his portrait. After three months of daily sittings in the critic’s study, the meticulous perfectionist walked away from the project, writing to Geffroy that he was “unable to bring to a satisfactory conclusion the work that is beyond my powers.” Nevertheless, what we see is one of the most marvelous portraits of the century, depicting the writer at his desk, a triangle of stability wedged between his books, which seem to be in motion on the shelves behind him and on the table in front.
During this decade and continuing to the end of his life, Cézanne turned to the local people of Aix-en-Provence for his subjects. He had a deep love of his region and for the moral virtues of its working people. Woman with a Cafetière is a formidable portrait of one of these formidable figures—the human equivalent of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire portrayed with an emphatic respect for her dignity and grandeur.
In striking contrast to the wild character of his early years, Cézanne’s last self-portrait (1898-1900) shows a man in his sixties, suffering from diabetes, a shadow of his former self. The terribilità of an old man has replaced the obstreperousness of youth. Some of the other works in the final rooms, such as Old Woman with a Rosary, may also be considered spiritual self-portraits. In two large portraits of his devoted gardener, Vallier, the sitter wears a visored cap, shadowing brooding eyes, eyes that suggest the reveries the painter might have observed in Rembrandt’s self-portraits.
Cézanne rejected some of the traditional aims of portraiture. He refused to flatter. He wouldn’t make men look important or women beautiful. He wanted to paint the authentic presence of somebody seen. He took immense pains with these works, frequently making outrageous demands on the endurance of his sitters. In turn, these paintings require patience of us, and a kind of slow looking before they will unfold their magical designs. In a 1905 letter, Cézanne penned this credo: “I have always been grateful to the audience of intelligent art lovers who have sensed what I was trying to do. . . . One does not replace the past, one only adds a new link.” Without Cézanne’s work as a guide and inspiration, Matisse’s portrait of his wife and Picasso’s of Gertrude Stein would be unthinkable. To our selfie-infatuated age, Cézanne’s portraits may seem even more radical than when he painted them.
Joseph R. Phelan is a Washington-based author and teacher, and the founding editor of Artcyclopedia.com.
