Paul Cézanne: The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement

Only the newspaper’s title can be read with any certainty in Paul Cézanne’s large portrait of his father. The upper edge of the broadsheet has been folded forward so that the masthead of L’Événement faces the viewer in black capitals, while Louis-Auguste Cézanne, banker of Aix-en-Provence, lowers his eyes to columns that the painter turned into broad patches of grey and white. The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement is an oil on canvas of 1866 in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, which acquired it in 1970 (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1970.5.1). The work is also known as Louis-Auguste Cézanne, the Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement.

Paul Cézanne, The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement, 1866, oil on canvas, 198.5 × 119.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon.

The scale is considerable for a domestic subject. The museum records 198.5 by 119.3 centimetres, a measurement often rounded to 200 by 120, and the tall, narrow format holds one seated man, one armchair and a corner of a room. Within Cézanne’s early work, before the lighter palette of the 1870s, it is among the most ambitious canvases, and it is the only painting by him generally accepted as having been admitted to the Paris Salon.

The Seated Figure and the Tilted Room

The armchair is the first thing to register, and possibly the strangest. Its high, winged back rises over the upper left of the canvas, turned at an angle and pushed so far towards the left edge that the frame nearly clips it. A white slipcover, scattered with loose pink and red flowers, is laid in with strokes dragged down the wing in long vertical streaks. The National Gallery’s description notes that both man and chair are bounded by black contours, and these dark seams hold the composition together where the paint is at its loosest.

Louis-Auguste wears a close-fitting black cap, from beneath which white hair escapes at the temple, a high white collar, a dark jacket, blue-grey trousers and brown shoes. His head is bowed. Light falls from the left across the forehead, cheek and nose, while the side of the face towards the right of the picture sinks into an ochre half-shadow. His right hand raises the newspaper close to his face; his left hand, lower and further out, grips the folded edge where the sheet bends over. Between them the paper becomes a large, pale, almost rectangular field set across the middle of the canvas.

Below the newspaper the legs carry most of the pictorial weight. The thighs project towards the viewer, modelled in blue-grey with flicks of white, and the shins converge towards the shoes at the lower margin, from which a dark shadow spreads across the floor to the left. The floor itself, a greenish ochre plane, rises steeply, and the small dark foot of the chair at lower right seems a slight support for so solid a sitter. Whether this instability was calculated or arose from the painter’s handling of space cannot be settled from the picture alone; the effect, in any case, is of a man settled firmly in a seat that is not quite settled in its room. Behind him an olive-brown wall closes the space, a door deep in shadow occupies the right side, and above the crest of the chair hangs a small dark picture.

L’Événement and Zola’s Salon of 1866

According to the National Gallery, Louis-Auguste built a successful hat business and then founded a bank in Aix-en-Provence, intending his only son to follow him into it. Cézanne pursued painting instead. The museum describes the portrait as a revelation of their complicated relationship: the patriarch is shown at ease at home, in cap and slippers, his self-assurance intact, yet the painter has placed signs of his own vocation in the same room.

The newspaper is the most public of those signs. In the spring of 1866 Émile Zola, Cézanne’s friend, wrote a series of Salon reviews for L’Événement, a Parisian daily, under the general title Mon Salon; individual instalments appeared on 30 April and 11 May of that year. The articles were then gathered into a small volume, Mon Salon, published in 1866 with a dedication to Paul Cézanne. A father absorbed in L’Événement in a portrait painted that year is therefore holding the paper in which his son’s closest ally had just argued in print about painting and the official exhibition system. Whether Louis-Auguste was a regular reader of that particular paper is a separate question, and the surviving documentation cited here does not resolve it.

What the painting does with the newspaper is equally telling. In a review of the Cézanne Portraits exhibition, Alexis Clark contrasted Édouard Manet’s portrait of Zola, where pamphlets and prints on the wall can be read and identified, with Cézanne’s portraits of readers and writers, in which texts are present but withheld. Here the masthead is the single legible element; the rest of the sheet is surface, brushwork, a field of greys. The viewer learns which paper is being read and nothing of what it says.

The Still Life Above the Chair

The small picture on the wall, partly overlapped by the crest of the armchair, shows a blue vessel and green fruit against a dark ground. It reproduces one of Cézanne’s own early still lifes, Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup (Sucrier, poires et tasse bleue), a canvas of 30.2 by 41 centimetres that belongs to the Musée d’Orsay and has been on deposit at the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence since 2006. The French Ministry of Culture’s collection record states directly that Cézanne repeated this still life on the wall behind the sitter in the Washington portrait.

The National Gallery reads the inserted picture as the artist’s way of entering the work himself: a sample of his painting, executed in the heavy manner he had learned from Gustave Courbet, hung above his father’s head, and possibly a statement of independence. The Musée d’Orsay dates the still life broadly, between 1865 and 1870. If the portrait belongs to 1866, the still life must already have existed by then, but the portrait’s own date has not always been agreed (see below), and the two chronologies therefore depend partly on each other. In 2025 the Musée Granet’s exhibition Cezanne au Jas de Bouffan borrowed the portrait from Washington and showed it together with the still life it depicts.

Paint and Surface in The Artist’s Father, Reading L’Événement

The portrait is built from thick paint laid on in large, separate strokes. On the trousers the strokes follow the length of the thigh and break into white where the cloth catches the light; on the newspaper they lie flat and wide, with little modelling; on the slipcover they run downwards, so that the floral pattern seems to be dissolving as it is painted. The National Gallery associates these heavy slabs of pigment with Courbet’s example, the same source it identifies in the inset still life. The expression couillarde, Cézanne’s own blunt term for his early, aggressively loaded manner, is often applied to the work of these years, and Clark’s review uses it for the self-portraits of the early 1860s.

Narrow and deep, the colour range extends through browns and blacks in the jacket, wall and doorway; the cool blue-grey of the trousers; the chalky whites of the chair cover, the collar and the paper; touches of pink and red in the floral pattern. Against this restrained range, the green and blue of the small still life stand out.

The physical structure of the canvas has been examined. Madeleine Hours published a technical study, “Cézanne’s Portrait of His Father”, in the National Gallery’s Studies in the History of Art (vol. 4, 1971–72), illustrated with infrared, ultraviolet fluorescence, raking-light and X-ray photographs of the painting, according to the online catalogue raisonné.

An Earlier Reading Portrait at the Jas de Bouffan

The Washington canvas has a direct predecessor. The Painter’s Father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne, dated to about 1865 and now in the National Gallery, London, shows the same man seated with legs crossed and head bowed, absorbed in reading. It was painted directly onto an alcove wall in the salon of the Jas de Bouffan, the country house outside Aix that Louis-Auguste had bought in 1859. A photograph said to date from 1905 shows it still in place, flanked by four paintings of the seasons. The decorations were detached from the walls after Cézanne’s death; the London picture, in oil on painted plaster later mounted on canvas, measures 167.6 by 114.3 centimetres and was acquired by the gallery in 1968.

Placed side by side, the two works show how the subject changed. The earlier image belonged to the fabric of the family house, part of a wall in a room the father owned. The Washington portrait is a movable canvas, larger, with a named newspaper and an inset still life, and it was later presented to a public jury. John Rewald’s essay “Cézanne and His Father”, published in the same 1971–72 volume of Studies in the History of Art as Hours’s technical study, discusses the portraits of Louis-Auguste and the relationship behind them.

Dating, the Salon of 1882 and the Road to Washington

The museum dates the painting to 1866, and Rewald’s catalogue raisonné places it more precisely in the autumn of that year. Earlier scholarship varied. The online catalogue raisonné records Lionello Venturi’s original dating of 1868–70, later revised to 1866–67; Georges Rivière’s 1868; Douglas Cooper’s 1866 in one publication and 1864–65 in another; and Lawrence Gowing’s “about 1866”. The 1866 date is now standard, though it rests on stylistic and circumstantial evidence, including the year of Zola’s Mon Salon.

Its public career began late. The catalogue raisonné identifies it with no. 520 at the Salon of 1882, exhibited as Portrait de M. L. A..., and notes that it was the only work by Cézanne ever accepted at the Salon. The National Gallery is more cautious and lists the 1882 Salon as a probable exhibition. The same catalogue entry records that the artist kept the canvas rolled up until his death in 1906.

From Cézanne’s estate the painting passed to Ambroise Vollard, then to the collector Auguste Pellerin, and by inheritance to René Lecomte and his family. Mme Louis de Chaisemartin, née Germaine Charlotte Lecomte, sold it in 1970 through the Paris dealer Hector Brame to the National Gallery of Art, with funds provided by Paul Mellon. It has since travelled to major exhibitions on the painter, including Cézanne: The Early Years 1859–1872 (London, Paris and Washington, 1988–89) and Cézanne Portraits (Paris, London and Washington, 2017–18), and in 2025 it returned to Aix for the Jas de Bouffan exhibition, where it hung near the small still life painted on its wall.