Paul Cézanne

Ambroise Vollard, Paris
Dr Rudolf Bauer, Frankfurt-am-Main (his estate sale, Max Perl, Berlin, 12th December 1932)
Simon Hirschland Bank, Essen (purchased at the above sale)
Burkhardt & Co. (acquired as an asset of the Simon Hirschland Bank, 5th October 1938)
André Weil, Paris
M. Knoedler & Co., New York (acquired by 1942)
M. Curtis Baer, New York (acquired by 1952)
Donald & Jean Stralem, New York (sale: Sotheby's, New York, Impressionist and Modern Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of Donald and Jean Stralem, 8th May 1995, lot 7)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Fine Arts Associates (Otto Gerson), Cézanne- Rarely Shown Works, 1952, no. 1
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990-91 (on loan)

Ambroise Vollard archives, photo no. 200
Lionello Venturi, Cézanne, son art - son oeuvre, Paris, 1936, vol. I, no. 78, catalogued p. 83; vol. II, no. 78, illustrated pl. 20 (titled Portrait de Marie Cézanne, soeur de l'artiste and as dating from 1865-67)
Gaëtan Picon & Sandra Orienti, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Cézanne, Paris, 1975, no. 73, illustrated p. 89 (titled Portrait de Marie Cézanne, soeur de l'artiste and as dating from 1865-67)
John Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne. A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1996, vol. I, no. 118, catalogued pp. 106-107; vol. II, no. 118, illustrated p. 39

The sitter for the present portrait was originally identified by Venturi as the artist's younger sister Marie. There is only one other recorded portrait of Marie now in the collection of The Saint-Louis Art Museum, and while both paintings share a similar date of execution, pose and the palette-knife construction, their differences are still noteworthy: the present painting favours a darker palette, the figure subtly emerging from the deep black background, her eyes downcast. The overall mood is far more dramatic and romantic – presaging Van Gogh portraits of Dutch peasant women of the 1880s.

 

John Rewald wrote about the present work: 'Venturi has identified the model as the artist's sister Marie, born in July 1841. This seems unlikely however when one compares this portrait with the photograph [fig. 1] dating from about 1870, or with no. 119 [fig. 2], which is documented as Marie Cézanne. One might rather see a certain similarity between this portrait and that of the artist's mother, no. 148; Rivière mentions, in fact, two portraits of Cézanne's mother, which he dates from 1864. Yet one should not rule out the possibility that this is one of Uncle Dominique's daughters […] since the elder was about thirty years old in 1867' (J. Rewald, op. cit., pp. 106-107).

 

While the identity of the sitter may be open to debate, the painting's place amongst the artist's early masterworks is not. The surface of the present portrait is extraordinary for its thick spackles of paint. Cézanne employed a palette knife to lay on his pigment in dense, creamy strokes – the picture surface seems as much sculpted as it is painted. This method, first introduced by Courbet, had been adapted by the Impressionists as a new way to achieve ambient effects. It was Cézanne, however who saw the style’s true potential and exploited the effects with vigour and even crudeness. Despite its spontaneous effects and impression of feverish application, the technique was used by the artist to achieve a heightened level of composition and painterly structure.

 

Lawrence Gowing wrote about the artist's early years: 'The characteristic achievement of the middle sixties, the palette-knife pictures, most of them portraits, were not at all baroque, neither linear nor in any way historicist except in the variety of costumes that his uncle Dominique was made to wear. The units of style were the tonal slabs out of which the images were built. The whole astonishing group of pictures, of which seven heads, including the first mature self-portrait and five half-length  portraits as well as the full-length survive, would seem to have been painted between August 1866 and the following January. Cézanne is described as finishing each of the heads in an afternoon; it was extraordinary testimony to his abilities'.

 

'The palette-knife pictures were exceptional. Looking at them stacked against his studio wall thirty years afterwards, Cézanne called them une couillarde - and the coarse word for ostentatious virility suited the crudity of the attack with which the palette-knife expressed the indispensable force of temperament […] Only  Pissarro understood what Cézanne had begun in this group of pictures. This phase was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment. But beyond this, Cézanne was the fist man in the group, perhaps the first man in history, to realize the necessity for the manner in which paint is handled to build up a homogeneous and consistent pictorial structure' (L. Gowing, Cézanne, The Early Years 1859-1872, New York, 1989, pp. 9-10).