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Lot Essay
Painted in 1866-1867, Paul Cézanne’s striking Portrait dates from the early, formative years of the artist’s career. Having decided in the early 1860s to go against his father’s wishes and pursue his true passion for art, Cézanne entered into a period of bold and fervent artistic experimentation, looking at a variety of themes and subjects, and absorbing the lessons of the great masters both of the present and the past. Portraiture was crucial in this early development and nowhere is the artist’s instinctive artistic ability more visible than in these first resonating examples. With dramatic tonal contrasts, strong colours and vigorously handled paint, works such as Portrait are impassioned, intense and powerful, an emphatic testament to Cézanne’s dogged desire to forge his own artistic identity.
In 1866, the year Portrait was begun, Cézanne increasingly focused his attention on portraiture, creating a remarkable series of works that challenged convention with their innovative technique and radical style. Painting those around him at his home in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne scrutinised his sitters’ features with a penetrating gaze, capturing a variety of nuanced physiognomical idiosyncrasies. Using thick paint, applied roughly in irregular, dense strokes, in some cases with a palette knife, Cézanne built up an almost sculptural portrayal of his subjects. In Portrait, strokes of strikingly contrasting colour – tones of black, white and deep blue – are layered across the canvas, applied with thick, heavily textured brushstrokes. Executed with an expressive sense of spontaneity, this portrait takes on an arresting and powerful immediacy, heightened by the illuminated, intense gaze of the female figure, her head slightly tilted as she rests upon her elbow.
With a painting such as Portrait, Cézanne has intensified the style and technique of his contemporaries: Manet’s elegant and dramatic tonal juxtapositions of black and white colour, and Courbet’s use of thick, robust brushstrokes, pushing the conventions of traditional painting to its extreme. Colour is no longer tonally modelled nor softly gradated, but is forcefully applied with a startling vigour, force and virility. A purely illusionistic representation of Cézanne’s sitter has been replaced with a more expressive portrayal of the subject, a concept that would come to define portraiture of the Twentieth Century. Looking back at these early works, Cézanne described this roughly hewn, dramatic style as couillard or ‘ballsy’; a term that encapsulates the daring and powerful nature of these paintings.
Portrait was once owned by the renowned collector Auguste Pellerin. A wealthy industrialist, Pellerin assembled one of the largest and most important collections of Cézanne’s work, a selection from which was exhibited at the posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work held in Paris in 1907.
In 1866, the year Portrait was begun, Cézanne increasingly focused his attention on portraiture, creating a remarkable series of works that challenged convention with their innovative technique and radical style. Painting those around him at his home in Aix-en-Provence, Cézanne scrutinised his sitters’ features with a penetrating gaze, capturing a variety of nuanced physiognomical idiosyncrasies. Using thick paint, applied roughly in irregular, dense strokes, in some cases with a palette knife, Cézanne built up an almost sculptural portrayal of his subjects. In Portrait, strokes of strikingly contrasting colour – tones of black, white and deep blue – are layered across the canvas, applied with thick, heavily textured brushstrokes. Executed with an expressive sense of spontaneity, this portrait takes on an arresting and powerful immediacy, heightened by the illuminated, intense gaze of the female figure, her head slightly tilted as she rests upon her elbow.
With a painting such as Portrait, Cézanne has intensified the style and technique of his contemporaries: Manet’s elegant and dramatic tonal juxtapositions of black and white colour, and Courbet’s use of thick, robust brushstrokes, pushing the conventions of traditional painting to its extreme. Colour is no longer tonally modelled nor softly gradated, but is forcefully applied with a startling vigour, force and virility. A purely illusionistic representation of Cézanne’s sitter has been replaced with a more expressive portrayal of the subject, a concept that would come to define portraiture of the Twentieth Century. Looking back at these early works, Cézanne described this roughly hewn, dramatic style as couillard or ‘ballsy’; a term that encapsulates the daring and powerful nature of these paintings.
Portrait was once owned by the renowned collector Auguste Pellerin. A wealthy industrialist, Pellerin assembled one of the largest and most important collections of Cézanne’s work, a selection from which was exhibited at the posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work held in Paris in 1907.