Étude d'après la Mise au tombeau du Titien

Cezanne was 25 and getting nowhere. He had come up from Aix to Paris, been refused by the entrance examination of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and was having his submissions turned down by the Salon jury year after year. What he did instead was register as a copyist at the Louvre, which let him set up in the galleries and work from the pictures directly. This is one of those mornings. Titian's Entombment, painted around 1520, hangs there still, and Cezanne took it down onto a sheet of paper about 20 by 30 centimetres, laying in the heavy diagonal of the body being carried and very little else. He was still going back to copy in the Louvre in the last decade of his life.