Homme assis (Seated Man)

In 1900 the painter Maurice Denis made a group portrait he called Homage to Cézanne. Painters and friends crowd around one of Cézanne's still lifes in the Paris shop of his dealer, Ambroise Vollard, and at the far left stands Odilon Redon, the Symbolist known for his dreamlike charcoal drawings. Redon was also the first owner of this canvas, painted between about 1898 and 1900, and the National Museum in Oslo says he valued it from the start. Nobody has identified the sitter. Vollard's stock book describes the picture plainly, a seated man holding a newspaper, both hands on his knees, a sideboard and curtains behind him. The patterned cloth on the wall appears in several of Cézanne's paintings and has no practical role in the room. Exhibition catalogues later changed what he was holding. In Berlin in 1912 he was listed as a man reading, and in Cologne that same year as a seated man with a book.