The Artist's Son in the Red Chair

The boy is Paul, Cézanne's only child, about eight when this was painted around 1880. He seems to perch on the arm of a red armchair, though all we see of it is the back, a big rounded shape that fills the right side and nearly touches his head. Cézanne cuts both of them off abruptly at the edges, a close, lopsided framing that the Musée de l'Orangerie compares to photography. The curves repeat everywhere. The chair, his shoulders, the collar and the cap of dark hair all follow the same round line, and the chair's red sinks into the colour of his shirt against a cool blue-green wall. The museum calls it the most ambitious of Cézanne's portraits of his son. The date is not settled, and the catalogue of Cézanne's paintings places it in 1881 or 1882. Its first owner was the critic Adolphe Tavernier, then the dealer Ambroise Vollard, and the Louvre bought it in 1963.