Mysterious youth
To say that Paul Cézanne’s paintings of children were unsentimental is an understatement. Here, the son of a hotel gardener becomes a sphinx, with eyes that seem to stare eternally into unknown mysteries. His pale, symmetrical face – with its elegant arcs of eyebrows – might be a painted mask.
Get away
The French painter was on holiday in Switzerland, bored and itching to get back to his beloved Provence, when he painted this startling portrait. What he had in mind was a formal exercise, a study in shades of cool sage and soft amber, as well as an experiment in parallel brushstrokes, which build the folds of the smock.
New order
He was more interested in geometry – engaging with the natural world via the sphere, cylinder and cone, as he famously put it – than psychological realism.
Over and over
Cézanne never took commissions for portraits, preferring to paint friends, family and rural workers. Sitters are given the same attention as the scenery in his paintings, and might reappear in serialised studies like so many apples.
Hollow men
The effect of draining someone of personality is, however, anything but neutral. As with this young boy, they might become timeless archetypes or, more disturbingly, reflections on the modern notion of slippery, elusive selfhood.
Cézanne Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, WC2, to 11 February
