An Old Woman with a Rosary

In November 1895 the dealer Ambroise Vollard gave Cezanne his first one-man show in Paris. He was 56, and for most of the city it was the first sight of his work. Around the same time this canvas was lying on the floor of his studio outside Aix-en-Provence with a pipe dripping onto it. The poet Joachim Gasquet, a young admirer from Aix, said he found it there and carried it off. Gasquet also supplied the story of the sitter, a nun who had left her convent and wandered until Cezanne took her on as a servant. Nothing confirms it, and his accounts of the painter are not always reliable. The stain is still there in the lower left corner, where the water came down.