Garçon couché (Boy Resting)

Cézanne painted nudes outdoors and sitters indoors. A single clothed figure stretched out in a landscape is rare in his work, and nobody has established who the young man is. The standard catalogue of his paintings lists the sitter as unidentified, and records that the painter's son later wrote on a photograph of it, Jas de Bouffan, 1895. The Jas de Bouffan was the family property outside Aix that Cézanne inherited in 1886, when his father died and left him free of money worries for the first time. The date is unsettled as well. Catalogues have placed the picture in the mid 1880s, around 1887, and around 1890. Those are the years when he started the card players, painting men who worked on the estate. The canvas went through the Paris dealer Ambroise Vollard and reached Los Angeles in the collection of Armand Hammer.