Portrait of Anthony Valabrègue

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Artist: Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 60 × 50.2 cm (23 5/8 × 19 3/4 in.)
Culture: French
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

When a jury member at the Paris Salon of 1866 saw Paul Cézanne’s portrait of the poet and critic Antony Valabrègue, he exclaimed that the portrait was not painted with a palette knife but with a pistol. The coarse appearance created by Cezanne’s bold, almost violent technique led Valabrègue, a longtime friend of the artist, to complain to the writer Zola: “He has given me such a fierce complexion that it reminds me of the statue of Champfleury when it was stained with squashed blackberries.”

Valabrègue nonetheless posed several more times for Cézanne, including for the present portrait, thought to have been painted around 1869 to 1871. By this point the painter had substituted brushes for palette knives but was still using them to similar effect. With broad brushes Cézanne applied a limited range of colors in thick, successive layers, practically sculpting his friend’s face, hair and beard in paint. The result was a deliberately crude, rough-hewn likeness that deviated sharply from the decorous conventions of bourgeois portraiture during this period.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.