The Mystery of the Lost Cezanne by M. L. Longworth Page A

face.”
    Marine bent down, getting as close to the canvas as possible without touching it. She said, “There are all kinds of color in her face: pink, of course, but look at those bits of green and blue. Even yellow.” She pointed, her finger hovering about an inch above the canvas. “Yellow in her eyebrows, and at the tip of her mouth.”
    â€œCézanne called them ‘sensations of color,’” Anatole Bonnet said, “like planes of color falling on top of each other. It happens in the backgrounds, too; they were just as important to him as the face. Cézanne—I mean, the painter of this canvas—has given just as much attention to the green wall behind the sitter as he does her face. That’s a Cézanne quality.”
    â€œYou can see those Cézanne geometric forms here, too,” Verlaque said, pointing to the canvas. “The ruffled collar of her dress is just a series of cylinders.”
    â€œ
Exactement
,” Marine’s father replied. “But this has something else—”
    â€œWhat?” Marine and Verlaque asked in unison.
    â€œPersonality,” Dr. Bonnet replied. “Because Antoine’s right—Cézanne was more interested in shape and color than in the sitter. But this young woman’s personality shines through.”
    The foursome stood in silence, staring at the red-haired woman, who sat upright, laughing at the painter. She had full lips and large blue eyes, wore a simple blue blouse and skirt, and in her hands she played with a thin yellow ribbon. The chair was a wood-backed one of the sort still popular in Provence, and the wall was green with no paintings or other adornments.
    â€œAnd Cézanne usually didn’t reveal the sitter’s personality?” Paulik asked.
    â€œNo,” Dr. Bonnet replied. “He didn’t. He never hired female models, either. Even his
Bathers
series he took from nude studies from the Académie Suisse in Paris, where he had studied as a young man. He was notoriously shy, especially around women.”
    â€œHence all the portraits of Hortense,” Marine suggested.
    â€œYes, he was married to Hortense, so there must have been an easiness between them, or a familiarity at least.”
    â€œWas it usual for him to sign his paintings?” Verlaque asked, pointing to the
P. Cézanne
written on the painting’s right-hand bottom corner.
    â€œNo,” Dr. Bonnet said. “He rarely signed, as he was frequently unhappy with his results. And he rarely dated his works, but this one is clearly dated, ’85.”
    â€œAs if he wanted to remember the date,” Marine said. “Like dating the back of a photograph.”
    Anatole Bonnet mumbled to himself, took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket, and blew his nose. “His last portraits, painted in 1905 and ’06, just before his death, were of his gardener, old Vallier,” he said, folding up his hankie. “Those had more intimacy than the earlier portraits, at least for me, because you see in the old man’s face the painter’s own fear of dying, of growing old.”
    Marine looked at her father and tried to see if he felt the same fear. She had never spoken to her parents about growing old, probably because they never sat still.
    â€œIt’s the gardener’s aged, wrinkled hands that reveal Cézanne’s old age,” he went on. “And in those paintings the paint is layered on, very thickly, like in this portrait.”
    â€œIt’s very Rembrandtesque,” Marine said.
    â€œA very apt comparison,” Dr. Bonnet said, smiling. “The paintings of Vallier are very moving, like Rembrandt’s late self-portraits. But this one is joyous. And if we are to believe the date, it was painted a good twenty years before the Vallier portraits.”
    â€œSo it’s not in his later style?” Verlaque asked.
    â€œNot at all,” Dr. Bonnet answered.