Paysan assis

The man here was a real farmhand at the Jas de Bouffan, the country house near Aix-en-Provence that Cézanne's father, a hatter turned banker, had bought when the painter was a boy. Through the early 1890s Cézanne kept painting these local labourers, sitting them down and studying them with the same patience he gave to apples or to his mountain. This one never turns up among the card players in his famous series of those same years, but he belongs to the same world and the same sober mood. There is no anecdote here, no story being told. Cézanne is after the plain weight of a body at rest, built up in slabs of blue and earth colour, a working man made as solid and still as the wall behind him.