Jules Peyron

Jules Peyron was a tax clerk in Gardanne, a hill town above Aix where Cézanne had settled in the mid-1880s, and he was 32 when he stood as a witness at Cézanne's wedding to Hortense Fiquet in April 1886. The wedding sat in the middle of an odd year. A month before it Zola published a novel about a failed painter, after which the two men, friends since school, stopped writing to each other, and in October Cézanne's father died and left him enough money never to worry about selling again. Peyron is barely documented otherwise. He was a neighbour who happened to be at hand, which is how Cézanne generally found his sitters. The canvas went to Harvard in 1961 as a gift from Joseph Pulitzer Junior and his wife.