The Conversation

The dealer Ambroise Vollard, who sold much of Cézanne's work, described this canvas in his stock book in one plain line: a woman seated in an armchair, a young man standing beside her, a dog on the ground. Vollard's records dated it about 1875. The catalogues of Cézanne's paintings have since placed it a little earlier, in 1872 or 1873, among the invented figure scenes he was still painting alongside his landscapes. In October 1910 it was bought by Auguste Pellerin, a Paris margarine manufacturer who built one of the largest Cézanne collections of his day, and in 1913 a German art journal reproduced it under the title Im Park, In the Park. Later it crossed the Atlantic to Colonel Edgar William Garbisch and his wife, who were better known for collecting American folk painting. Their collection was sold in New York in 1980, and the picture went to an owner in Japan before it came up at auction again in London in 2014.