Sale 1229, Lot 14
Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)
Portrait de Paul Cézanne, c. 1895
Oil on canvas
Estimate: $15,000,000-20,000,000

The artist who would have the greatest impact on 20th century western art, painted just four self-portraits in the last fifteen years of his life. The present painting is Cézanne's penultimate depiction of himself, done when the artist was around 55 years old, and the only late self-portrait that remains in private hands.

It shows the artist as he appeared to himself at an eventful time in his career, and in a way that seems entirely accessible to the viewer. Notwithstanding his extraordinary achievements as a painter, Cézanne comes across in this painting, as he does in his letters and in firsthand accounts of him, as a man with whom we might easily brush shoulders, and come to understand as we would a relative or friend.
Before the age of 30 Cézanne appeared as an uncouth and unkempt Bohemian with provincial manners. He antagonized almost everyone. His paintings were violent and primitive, and pleased no one who could help his career. He fought with his family over his vocation, and had to hide his liaison with Hortense Fiquet from his domineering and disappointed father. He sat out the Franco-Prussian War in his hometown, Aix, and was declared a draft dodger.

France's defeat in 1871, and the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune, had a devastating effect on the national psyche. The Impressionists' idyllic view of the countryside and emphasis on transient effects of light created a world far removed from this. By now a father, Cézanne saw the need to be more practical and sought a place within the creative circle. He became friendly with Pissarro in 1873. Painting by the older man's side in Pontoise, he quickly became proficient in the new technique of Impressionism, then moved beyond.

Determined to seek reconciliation, he moved from the radical periphery toward the more moderate middle-ground. To achieve this rapprochement, Cézanne modified the radical persona that he had so carefully cultivated during the 1860s.

Along with his landscapes, still lifes, and portraits of the period, the self-portraits participated significantly in the reconstruction of his public and private identity, fashioning an alternative, moderate self, less likely to discomfit either the critical art public or the embourgeoisés figures of the avant garde (S. Platzman, Cézanne: The self-portraits, London 2001, p. 65).

By the time he painted the present self-portrait, around 1895, he was in his mid-fifties and his achievement was highly esteemed among a widening circle of painters. But real success eluded him, and the effects of diabetes had made him increasingly irritable.

Since the early part of the decade Cézanne had been on increasingly poor terms with his wife Hortense, who persisted in living beyond their means. Cézanne paid for her apartment in Aix while he lived with his mother (who disliked Hortense) and sister Marie on their family estate at Jas de Bouffan in the suburbs.

He could escape to Paris for months at a time when necessary. Under Marie's influence, he became a practicing Catholic, attending mass and getting the news of the day exclusively from a Catholic daily paper.

In the autumn of 1895 Cézanne stayed at a hotel in Giverny, where Monet gave a reception for him, inviting the politician Georges Clemenceau, Auguste Rodin and other artists and writers.

Matilda Lewis, an American painter staying at the hotel, described Cézanne in a letter: 'When I first saw him I thought he looked like a cut-throat with large red-eyeballs standing out from his head in a most ferocious manner, a rather fierce-looking pointed beard, quite gray, and an excited way of talking that positively made the dishes rattle. I found that I later misjudged his appearance, for far from being a cut-throat, he has the gentlest nature possible, "comme un enfant" as he would say.'

Cézanne's behavior could be erratic - he suddenly left Giverny after the reception without telling Monet, who had to forward the paintings he had left behind at the hotel.

After another incident, Pissarro, wrote to his wife: 'Dr. Aguiard has…seen Cézanne; he is sure he is sick. In short, poor Cézanne is incensed with all of us, even with Monet, who after all, has been very nice to him.' Dr. Aguiard felt that Cézanne's state of mind did not make him responsible for these peculiar actions.

The man that we see, then, in the present self-portrait could be very moody, perhaps even manic, subject to fits of anger, suspicion and despair, followed by periods when he painted with what the critic Gustave Geoffroy called 'such passion and faith!'

These traits would become more apparent following his mother's death in 1897 and the 1899 sale of his beloved Jas de Bouffan estate.

The present self-portrait, shows him completely grey, and having grown back his sage-like beard. There is clearly a probing and questioning look, perhaps more akin to skepticism and uncertainty. He may seem remote and guarded, but he is no recluse: he directly engages the viewer.

It is as if he is sitting shoulder to shoulder with us, turning his head slightly and looking at us out of the corner of his eye, about to make some cogent comment. He may have tilted the mirror slightly, so that the viewer seems to gaze up at him. Like his beloved Mont Saint Victoire, Cézanne, the old man in the mountain, looms craggily above us.

Dr. Albert Barnes and Violette de Mazia described our painting as 'a very powerful portrait, one of Cézanne's best, [it] compares with the most successful characterizations of Titian, Tintoretto, El Greco, and Rembrandt, and is realized by a legitimate use of plastic means.

The figure is alive, the volumes are solid and real, the drawing is neither stiff nor rigid, and the modeling is done without obvious recourse to sharp contrasts or to blocks and facets. The constructive planes and volumes, like the entire figure, are much less angular, more fluid than is usual in Cézanne; there are no sharp contour-lines, and scarcely any evidence of difficulty in the placing of volumes in space.' (A. Barnes and V. de Mazia, The Art of Cézanne, New York, 1939, p. 360).

Other traits flesh out the portrait of this complicated man in the autumn of his years. An admirable nobility in his grey eminence. A sense of pride at having undertaken the struggle even if the outcome is unclear. Perhaps there is a glint of mischief in the eye under the cocked brow that harkens back to his Bohemian youth.

But most significantly, in the same way that the artist could discern, amid the chaotic transience of nature there are certain immutable and enduring forms. He must have been aware that in this picture of himself, with all its worldly cares and appearances, there resides an inner self that is heroic, indomitable and eternal, and that in these qualities people would discover and understand the achievement of his art.


John Steinert, Christie's Impressionist & Modern Art Department, New York


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