Boy in a Red Waistcoat

The boy's name was Michelangelo di Rosa. He was a professional model, one of many Italians who earned a living in the Paris studios of the 1880s by sitting still for hours, and Cezanne painted him four times over a couple of years, each time in a different pose. This is the largest of the four. The costume and the standing posture come from 16th-century Italian portraits of young aristocrats, a formal arrangement a painter of the 1880s had no particular reason to use. Cezanne worked slowly and asked for sitting after sitting, which is part of why hired models suited him better than friends did. The other three canvases ended up in Philadelphia, New York and Zurich.