Portrait of Gustave Geffroy
Encyclopedia
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
. It portrays Gustave Geffroy
Gustave Geffroy
Gustave Geffroy was a French journalist, art critic, historian, and novelist. He was one of the ten founding members of the literary organization Académie Goncourt in 1900....
, a French novelist and art critic
Art critic
An art critic is a person who specializes in evaluating art. Their written critiques, or reviews, are published in newspapers, magazines, books and on web sites...
noted as one of the earliest historians of Impressionism
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
. In March 1894, Geffroy wrote a sympathetic article in the periodical Le Journal
Le Journal (Paris)
Le Journal was a Paris daily newspaper published from 1892 to 1944 in a small, four-page format.It was founded and edited by Fernand Arthur Pierre Xau until 1899...
praising the work of painter Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
, who until then had received little praise in critical circles. Mutual friend Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...
arranged for a meeting between the two in November of that year, which ended abruptly due to Cézanne's oft-noted erratic behavior. Nonetheless, Geffroy continued to write favorably of Cézanne, believing "He is a great teller of truth. Passionate and candid, silent and subtle, he will go to The Louvre." Cézanne expressed thanks in letters to Geffroy in the months following their meeting, and, in a display of gratitude (and possible feeling Geffroy understood him), he elected to paint Geffroy's portrait
Portrait
thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...
.
The painter sent the critic a request in April 1895, after which Geffroy sat for Cézanne daily over a span of three months in the study at his home in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. After the three months' time, Cézanne, disappointed with the portrait's results, fled both the painting and Paris itself for his home in Aix-en-Provence
Aix-en-Provence
Aix , or Aix-en-Provence to distinguish it from other cities built over hot springs, is a city-commune in southern France, some north of Marseille. It is in the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in the département of Bouches-du-Rhône, of which it is a subprefecture. The population of Aix is...
. In a July 6 letter to Monet, he explained, "I am a little upset at the meager result I obtained, especially after so many sittings and successive bursts of enthusiasm and despair." It has also been speculated that, despite his words of gratitude in the same letter to Monet noting Geffroy's patience over the three-month span, the artist had built up feelings of resentment, even hostility, toward the critic, causing his abandonment of the project for seclusion in Aix. Reasons for the breakdown in relations on Cézanne's part have been attributed to everything from politics to artistic principles to religion.
Cézanne was unhappy with the painting and it was never finished, yet Portrait of Gustave Geffroy became a popular retrospective work after his death. Cubist painters were interested in the geometrical
Geometry
Geometry arose as the field of knowledge dealing with spatial relationships. Geometry was one of the two fields of pre-modern mathematics, the other being the study of numbers ....
dimensions of the bookcase and perspective
Perspective (visual)
Perspective, in context of vision and visual perception, is the way in which objects appear to the eye based on their spatial attributes; or their dimensions and the position of the eye relative to the objects...
of vast table space in relation to the rest of the pictorial space. Geffroy noted that Cézanne painted the entire canvas at once, leaving the face and hands for last; they were ultimately unfinished. The portrait has been described as angular, with the figure of Geffroy centered as a pyramidal or triangular figure, surrounded by shelves, books and figurines complementing and converging on top of his profile. The multiple angles of perspective, particularly with the books both in cases and on the table, have been noted for their "zig-zag" effect on the viewer, creating movement within the painting.
The portrait has been noted as the continuation of a recurring Cézanne theme: people in their natural environment, reserved and unimposing, immersed in their everyday tasks. It has also been compared to the earlier Portrait of Duranty by Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas
Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...
, from which critics have speculated Cézanne drew inspiration.
The painting was donated to the French state in 1969 by the family of collector Auguste Pellerin
Auguste Pellerin
Auguste Pellerin was a french entrepeneur and art collector. He was one of the most important collectors of the works of Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne at the beginning of the 20th century....
and is on permenant display at the Musée d'Orsay
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...
in Paris.
Sources
- Howard, Michael. Cézanne. New York: Gallery Books, 1990. ISBN 0-8317-2827-2
- Murphy, Richard W. The World of Cézanne. New York: Time-Life Books, 1968.
- Newton, Joy. Cézanne's Literary Incarnations. French Studies: A Quarterly Review 61.1, 2007. 36-46.
- Schapiro, Meyer. Cézanne. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. ISBN 0-8109-1043-8
- Wadley, Nicholas. Cézanne and his art. New York: Galahad, 1975. ISBN 0-88365-248-X