Ritratto di Ambroise Vollard

In 1899 the young dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had just given Cézanne his first solo show, agreed to sit for a portrait, and he never forgot it. Cézanne had him balance on a chair set on a packing crate and hold still for hours at a stretch, over something like 115 separate sittings. When Vollard once dozed and slipped, the painter snapped that he must sit like an apple, and an apple does not move. After all that, Cézanne pronounced himself only half satisfied, pointed out two small patches on the hands where he had left the canvas bare, and said he might find the right colour for them one day. He never came back to it. Vollard left the unfinished portrait to this Paris museum when he died.