Young Italian Woman at a Table

In the last decade of his life Cezanne worked mostly near Aix-en-Provence, out of the Paris fashion but increasingly watched by younger painters who treated him as a source. In those years he made a run of large single figures, usually sitting a local worker or servant for hours at a time. This young woman leans on a covered table with her head propped on one hand, the old pose for melancholy that painters had used since the Renaissance. Cezanne builds her out of separate blocks of colour laid side by side, so the body and the space around it feel weighed and solid. He rarely finished such figures quickly, and his patient sitters had to hold still through session after session.