The Four Seasons:Summer

In 1860 the young man painting these walls was supposed to be studying law. Paul Cézanne, about 21, had enrolled at the faculty in Aix to please his father, a banker who had recently bought the family a country house called the Jas de Bouffan. Cézanne covered the grand salon with four allegories of the seasons, and this is Summer, a calm standing figure done in a deliberately old-fashioned, almost archaic manner. Then he signed the panels 'Ingres', after the reigning master of academic classicism, a painter about as far from what Cézanne would become as you could get. No one is sure whether the signature teases his father's conventional taste or the official art of the day. The panels were later cut from the walls and passed through the estate of the dealer Ambroise Vollard before reaching the Petit Palais.