Portrait of Paul Cézanne

Pissarro painted his friend Cezanne in 1874, the year the two of them showed together in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. Cezanne had been coming out to Pissarro's house at Pontoise to paint beside the older man, and Pissarro renders him without flattery, a heavy, bearded figure in a thick coat, wary and ill at ease. The real charge sits on the wall behind him. Pinned on one side is a caricature of the realist painter Courbet raising a glass, and on the other a print of the conservative politician Adolphe Thiers plucking the French cockerel, a jab at the man who had crushed the Paris Commune three years earlier.