National Gallery of Art

Like critic Meyer Schapiro, many twentieth-century artists also saw Paul Cézanne as a sort of spiritual forbearer. Pablo Picasso called him a "mother hovering over"; Henri Matisse said he was a "father to us all."  As much as it is a portrait of a wistful young man, this painting is equally, and perhaps as essentially, an arrangement of colors and shapes. We can see it as a kind of stepping-off point for modern art, one with direct links to those younger artists’ work. The greens and mauves Cézanne used in the boy’s face and hands, for example, are like the “wild” colors that won Matisse and his colleagues the title “fauve” (wild beast), arbitrary touches with little connection to human flesh.  The background—it is hard even to “read” it as floral-patterned drapery—is fractured and flattened into a kaleidoscope of angles and arcs in a way that looks forward to the reconstructed spaces of the first cubist experiments by Georges Braque and Picasso.

Yet it would be a mistake to view this painting only in terms of what comes next. Boy in a Red Waistcoat also reflects Cézanne's admiration for and connection to the past. He said himself that he "wanted to make of impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the museums." He spent many hours teaching himself to be a painter by studying old masters in the Louvre. This boy’s pose, with hand resting on cocked hip, and the air of languid elegance that envelopes his slender form are reminiscent of sixteenth-century portraits by mannerist artists.

Cézanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, where his father, originally a hat maker, had become part owner of a bank. Cézanne received a strong classical education and shared his adolescence with Émile Zola, future novelist and critic. At his father’s insistence, Cézanne studied law but was increasingly drawn to art. In 1861 he went to Paris.             

Cézanne’s early works were dark and heavy. He applied pigments with emphatic brushstrokes or a palette knife, and his subjects were “difficult,” sometimes violent and erotic, deeply personal.

In the early 1870s, under the influence of the impressionists, Cézanne’s style changed. Working alongside his mentor Camille Pissarro, he turned to landscapes and adopted the impressionists' broken brushwork and brighter colors. He exhibited with them in 1874 and 1877 (his submissions provoking some of the most stinging ridicule). Cézanne’s paintings did not sell; in fact, they were seen by few except fellow painters.

As he grew disillusioned, he divided his time between Provence and the capital. After his father’s death in 1886, Cézanne moved permanently to Provence (though he kept a studio in Paris and made extensive visits there).  

The familiar landscape around Aix became his artistic center of gravity and most frequent motif. Even his still lifes evoke a sense of place, with olive jars and printed cotton cloths. Cézanne’s depictions of bathers, a subject he pursued to the end of his life, recall idyllic days of a youth spent under the southern sun.

Rejected by critics and working in isolation, Cézanne’s style developed independently. Beginning in the late 1870s and increasingly through the next decade, his brushwork became more ordered and systematic. Color relationships render the fundamentals of nature and the connectedness of what Cézanne saw and felt. After about 1895, these color harmonies become more autumnal, and the paintings more meditative. In failing health for several years—but still painting in the countryside almost every day—Cézanne died after being caught in a cold rain.