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Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

Cézanne - Garçon au gilet rouge

Paul Cézanne: “Garçon au gilet rouge (Boy in a Red Waistcoat)”, 89.5 × 72.4 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery The National Portrait Gallery presents ‘Cézanne Portraits’, the first exhibition devoted entirely to portraits by Paul Cézanne. 26 October 2017 – 11 February 2018.]]>

Source: National Portrait Gallery

Portraits previously unseen in the UK include the artist’s arresting “Self Portrait in a Bowler Hat” (1885-6) on loan from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek gallery in Copenhagen. Also on UK display for the first time since the 1930s will be “Boy in a Red Waistcoat” (1888-90), one of a series of paintings of a young man in Italian clothes identified as Michelangelo de Rosa, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and “Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair” (1888-90) on loan from The Art Institute of Chicago, last exhibited in London in 1936 and 1939 respectively.

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) painted almost 200 portraits during his career, including 26 of himself and 29 of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. “Cézanne Portraits” explores the special pictorial and thematic characteristics of Cézanne’s portraiture, including his creation of complementary pairs and multiple versions of the same subject. The chronological development of Cézanne’s portraiture is considered, with an examination of the changes that occurred with respect to his style and method, and his understanding of resemblance and identity. The exhibition also discusses the extent to which particular sitters inflected the characteristics and development of his practise.

Works included in the exhibition range from Cezanne’s remarkable portraits of his Uncle Dominique, dating from the 1860s, through to his final portraits of Vallier, who helped Cézanne in his garden and studio at Les Lauves, Aix-en-Provence, made shortly before the artist’s death in 1906. The paintings are drawn from museums and private collections in Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

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Cézanne Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery