Retrato de Anthony Valabrègue

By 1870 the young Cézanne had a reputation in Paris for painting like a man in a fight. He laid his colours on with a palette knife instead of a brush, in slabs so thick the surface almost stands off the canvas. The sitter here is Anthony Valabrègue, a poet from Cézanne's home town of Aix and one of his oldest friends. Valabrègue sat for him more than once and did not enjoy it. Of an earlier version he complained to their mutual friend Émile Zola that the painter had given him a complexion so fierce it looked stained with crushed blackberries. That summer France went to war with Prussia, and Cézanne left Paris to sit the fighting out on the southern coast.