Victor Chocquet Seated

In 1877 the Impressionists held their third group show in Paris, and most visitors came to laugh. One man stood in the rooms and argued back, defending the pictures to anyone who would listen. That was Victor Chocquet, a customs clerk of modest salary who spent what he had on painters almost nobody wanted, and who came to own more than 30 works by Cezanne alone. Here is how Cezanne painted his champion, seated and thin and watchful, the face and hands built from the same small blocks of colour as the wall behind him. Cezanne treated a sitter the way he treated a mountain or a bowl of apples, as planes to be set in order rather than a likeness to flatter. Degas, who knew how to land a sharp remark, called it the portrait of a madman painted by a madman. Chocquet went on buying anyway. The collection he built on a clerk's wages was broken up and sold after his widow died, and this portrait ended up in a museum in Columbus, Ohio, far from the Paris rooms where he once stood and argued for it.