Курильщик

The man with the clay pipe is not a hired model. He is Paulin Paulet, a labourer on the Jas de Bouffan, the estate outside Aix-en-Provence that Cezanne's father, a hatter turned banker, had bought decades earlier. Through the 1890s Cezanne kept painting the men who worked that land, the same faces that fill his Card Players. He wanted the plain gravity of people who sit still because they are tired, not because they are posing. So the pipe, the leaning elbow, the heavy jacket are built up in slow blocks of colour rather than smoothed into a likeness. Paulet gazes past us, in no hurry. Cezanne painted this same man with a pipe more than once, working the pose over the way he worked everything.