Portrait de Antoine-Fortuné Marion

Cezanne painted this small portrait of a friend from his home town of Aix, in the south of France. Antoine-Fortune Marion was no painter by trade. He was a young naturalist, a geologist who would later run the natural history museum in Marseille, and in these years the two men tramped the dry hills around Aix together, Marion reading the rock while Cezanne watched the light. Marion painted too, as a gifted amateur, so the sitter knew exactly what was being done to him here. Cezanne worked much of the paint on with a palette knife rather than a brush, pressing it down in thick flat slabs the way his hero Gustave Courbet did, and building the head out of blunt planes instead of smooth modelling. The result is dark, dense and a little raw, closer to a piece of masonry than to a flattering likeness. Scholars still argue over the exact year, somewhere around 1866 to 1871, early in a career that had barely begun to be noticed. Look at the surface and you can still see the ridges where the knife dragged the paint sideways.