Retrato de Louis Guillaume

The boy here is Louis Guillaume, a neighbour's son in Paris and a playmate of Cezanne's own child, Paul. Around 1882 Cezanne sat him down and painted him not as a charming young sitter but as a problem in solid form. The face is built from broad, sculpted planes, the expression withheld, the eyes left as dark hollows, the whole set against low greys, whites and dark greens. It reads less like a likeness caught in a moment than like a head slowly constructed, and that is exactly what younger painters would seize on. Henri Matisse, a generation later, took this way of treating a face as architecture and carried it much further. The panel itself is small, barely larger than a sheet of writing paper.