The Gardener Vallier
Paul Cézanne (1839 to 1906) · About 1906
An old man in a straw hat sits with his legs crossed and his hands folded, seen in profile against a wall of green and blue. His face is in shadow under the brim and the whole figure seems to be settling into the background, as if the painter had caught him just before he vanished into the garden. The sitter is Vallier, who worked as gardener and odd job man at Cézanne's studio at Les Lauves, above Aix-en-Provence, and who posed for a series of portraits in the painter's last year.
Cézanne built pictures out of small patches of colour laid next to one another, each a decision about warm and cool, near and far. Here the patches are large and loose, and areas of the canvas are left barely covered, so you can see the process in progress. Look at the hat, where a few curved strokes of ochre and white make a solid form, and at the hands, which are little more than a knot of blue and pink. The painting is unfinished, but Cézanne rarely considered anything finished, and the gaps are part of the argument that painting is a way of looking rather than a record.
The portrait was made around nineteen hundred and six, the year Cézanne died after being caught in a storm while painting outdoors. It came to the Tate in nineteen fifty three, and at Tate Modern it usually opens the story of modern art, hanging near Picasso and Braque, who called Cézanne the father of them all. A memorable detail: the wall behind Vallier is painted with the same colours as his coat, so that man and garden seem made of one substance.
Did You Know? Cézanne collapsed in a rainstorm while painting outdoors in October nineteen hundred and six and died a week later, leaving the Vallier portraits unfinished.
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