Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

The present painting depicts Cézanne's son Paul, born in January 1872 to Hortense Fiquet, whom the artist would marry fourteen years later. One of Cézanne's favorite portrait subjects, Paul appears in at least nine oils from the 1880s (Rewald, nos. 463-468, 534, 579, 649), together with more than a hundred drawings. He also posed for the figure of Harlequin in the monumental painting Mardi Gras of 1888 (Rewald, no. 618; Pushkin State Museum, Moscow).
In contrast to the earlier portraits of Paul, here he is captured in the throes of later adolescence, cocky and self-possessed. Painted circa 1890-1895 when Paul would have been about twenty years old, Garçon assis displays a sympathy for the psychological vicissitudes of youth. Dressed in a simple coat and cap and seated with his legs folded under him, it is a compassionate portrait of a young man painted against a vivid green and blue background. The brush strokes are sweeping and emphatic, as though the picture were executed in an inspired moment.
Cézanne had a complex attitude toward the notion of finish and often left passages of his paintings only lightly worked, as in the present canvas. These more open compositions seem to have exerted a special fascination on Cézanne's fellow painters. Camille Pissarro wrote in 1895, following a visit to Cézanne's first solo exhibition at Vollard's gallery, "There are exquisite things, still-lifes of irreproachable accomplishment, others much worked but left in a suspended state that are still more beautiful" (quoted in op. cit., exh. cat., 2000, p. 230).
Christina Feilchenfeldt has written, "As with Degas, the unfinished areas in portraits by Cézanne often draw attention to the completed portions and thus constitute an essential element of the pictorial conception...The artist deliberately omitted to fill the canvas, a finished pictorial solution having already been attained" (ibid., pp. 128-129).