Because my painting represents an unidentified portrait of a man that I believe dates to the artist’s Impressionist period, ca. 1875, the mystery of an unidentified lost portrait of a man exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1882 seemed like a fitting subject for further study.
I have since titled my painting The Fisherman. The details of my attribution, and how the painting came into my hands, are explained at The Fisherman homepage.
My choice of Cézanne was not arbitrary; specific indicators in the painting led me to his work.
While the focus of this page is to compile every published comment I can locate on the subject of Portrait de M. L. A..., I also intend—transparently—to establish the plausibility of my painting as that lost portrait. Even so, I will keep my comments on The Fisherman to a minimum while presenting the list and discussing the published material based on historical and biographical evidence.
When I began my studies, I knew nothing about Paul Cézanne. The three books that formed the foundation of my knowledge of his life and work were the biographies by Gerstle Mack (1942) and John Rewald (1948), along with Sir Lawrence Gowing’s Cézanne: The Early Years 1859–1872, which had just been published in 1988.
Both Rewald and Mack recount the story of a significant lost painting, and Rewald’s biography includes a translation of art critic Théodore Véron’s description of the work shown at the 1882 Salon, published in the Dictionnaire Véron. The Fisherman matched Véron’s description closely.
The fact that The Fisherman aligned with the contemporary description of Portrait de M. L. A… added another dimension to my studies, but my research on The Fisherman was not based on the assumption that it was that lost portrait. My attribution rests on historical and biographical information, vintage photographs, and my study of Cézanne’s paintings and drawings viewed through the lens of The Fisherman.
By contrast, Portrait de M. L. A… can only be studied through the published comments of art historians and biographers who agreed for more than a century that Cézanne’s painting exhibited at the Salon of 1882 was lost and unidentifiable.
Gowing’s catalogue for the traveling exhibition included over sixty stunning color plates, and his biographical essay on the early works—written from an artist’s perspective—was far more vivid and detailed than those by Rewald and Mack.
In addition to Gowing, the catalogue included contributions from five other authors, among them John Rewald. Although none of the essays mentioned the lost painting, the chronology for 1882 (p. 216) contains the entry: “Admitted to the Salon as ‘pupil’ of Guillemet; exhibits a portrait of a man (? a Self-Portrait).”.
I was not surprised that the Salon of 1882 was absent from essays devoted to the artist’s early works prior to 1872, yet the chronological entry made clear that the identity of that “portrait of a man” remained unresolved.
Another indication that the issue remained unresolved appears several pages later under the heading “List of Exhibitions including Cézanne’s Early Work” (p. 220), where the first entry is “1895 Paris, Galerie Vollard.” This list makes unmistakably clear that in a catalogue devoted to works from 1859 to 1872, not a single painting from that period had been exhibited before 1895. Separately, none of Cézanne’s works shown prior to 1895 in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1874 and 1877 are dated earlier than 1873. Taken together, these two facts quietly reinforce the impression that Cézanne himself had shown no interest in exhibiting his earliest works—an impression that, in 1988, seemed entirely consistent with a book whose index contained no listing for the Salon of 1882 or for Portrait de M. L. A….
The fact that the chronology mentioned a portrait exhibited in 1882—yet the list of early‑work exhibitions did not include it—corroborated the sense that both the identity and the dating of this “portrait of a man” remained unresolved as of 1988. Nothing in the catalogue suggested that the mystery had been settled; if anything, the internal inconsistencies confirmed that the question was still open.
I knew at the bookstore that neither the Salon of 1882 nor Portrait de M. L. A… appeared in the index, but in 1988 the biographical essays, historical photographs, and catalogue plates were worth the price of the book. The absence of the 1882 listing did not diminish its value; it simply meant that the story I was following lay outside the scope of this particular volume. What I could not have known then was that these omissions—the missing index entries, the unresolved chronology, and the pattern of what Cézanne chose to exhibit—would later become essential points of reference in understanding the larger historiographic puzzle.
John Rewald wrote the introduction to Sir Lawrence’s catalogue, and one passage seized my attention as forcefully as the story of Portrait de M. L. A…:
“Nevertheless, Gowing’s minute scrutiny of Cézanne’s early work has enabled him to establish a certain succession, to detect elements of continuity that reduce what would otherwise appear to be capriciousness. He allows us to follow the young master in the conquest of his own personality, in, one might say, the harnessing of his unruly temper. But there still remains a factor of uncertainty that even Sir Lawrence’s gifted insights cannot elucidate, namely, the unquestionably numerous works—major as well as minor—that were destroyed by the artist himself (or possibly even his father) or have simply been lost. With them has disappeared many a link that might otherwise have completed the chain of Cézanne’s evolution. To mention this does not minimise Lawrence Gowing’s achievements. It serves rather to illustrate some of the insurmountable problems he encountered in the pursuit of his heroic task.”
It seemed to me that Rewald was evoking the same mystery he had woven into every edition of his biography: the unresolved question surrounding the Salon of 1882. His words did not identify the missing work, but they acknowledged the gap — the broken link in the chain — with a candor that echoed everything I had just noticed in the catalogue’s chronology and exhibition list.
Rewald’s comments gave me a point of focus. If The Fisherman represented one of the missing links he described, it should provide a filter through which the evolutionary process becomes visible. Studies that had meant little to others without the context of the lost work might reveal their significance once viewed through that lens.
In my search for the pieces of the evolutionary puzzle, studying the artist’s drawings became a top priority. In the pre‑Internet late 1980s, tracking down color plates of Cézanne’s paintings, locating reproductions of his drawings, and gathering information about the Salon of 1882 was only possible through books. Even when I knew which volumes I needed, finding them was often a challenge.
My fourth purchase was a second‑hand set of The Drawings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné by Adrien Chappuis. I scrutinized the plates volume countless times, cover to cover, from every angle, searching for associated studies.
Over the years, as more books were digitized and became available online, my Portrait de M. L. A… database grew. Yet the Salon of 1882 remained an enigma, with each new comment I uncovered adding another layer to the mystery rather than resolving it.
With these sources in hand, and with the limits of the surviving record in mind, I turned to the published comments themselves. What follows is a chronological compilation of every reference I have been able to locate concerning Portrait de M. L. A…. Where clarification is needed, I have added brief, factual notes to situate each comment within its historical context, but the focus remains on presenting the documentary trail as it has come down to us.
Taken together, these early searches—fragmentary, analog, and often inconclusive—formed the foundation of everything that followed. They shaped not only the questions I asked but the way I learned to ask them. The three books I found in 1988 became the scaffolding for my approach as narrator and documentarian: a method built on close reading, cross‑checking, and following the faintest traces through the historical record. Before the digital era transformed access to Cézanne scholarship, this was the landscape: scattered clues, partial records, and a mystery that refused to resolve itself. It is from within that landscape that the following references must be read.
Cézanne’s nineteen‑year struggle to exhibit in the Paris Salon spanned a remarkable evolution in his art, moving from the dark, somber tones of the 1860s to the vibrant sunlight and color of the 1870s. Regardless of the provocative nature of some of his earlier submissions, by the spring of 1882 he knew that even if the jury rejected his entry, his friend—and jury member—Antoine Guillemet had a plan to ensure it would be shown.
Explication Des Ouvrages De Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture, Gravure Et Lithographie Des Vivants Exposés Au Palais Des Champs-Elysées Le 1 mai 1882 - Charles De Mourgues Fréres - Paris, 1882
The Salon archives website boasts detailed records going back centuries and features a “Submit an Archive Request” form. However, after several requests in which I included the information for no. 520 from the 1882 Salon catalogue, I was informed that they had not retained any documentation for Cézanne’s Portrait de M. L. A… beyond the information available in the catalogue itself.
Had it survived, the registration form for the submission would have included the full title and the dimensions of the work — the latter of which would at least clarify everything it was not.
Without the Salon registration form, the complete title of Portrait de M. L. A… may never be known, a fate shared by many other portraits whose titles were abbreviated. There appears to have been some level of favoritism involved, as some portraits list full names, others only surnames, and many are reduced to initials. The abbreviated titles seem to have been reserved for select portrait subjects.
The other uncertainty surrounding the abbreviated titles involved the “…” (trois petits points, or points de suspension) following the final initial, and whether that final initial marked the end of a longer title or represented the sitter’s surname. Because both forenames and surnames can be hyphenated, it is possible for either to contain more than one initial, but hyphenated initials would appear without spaces.
I assumed it would be straightforward to verify the full names behind the abbreviated titles by searching for the artists’ works online. Instead, it became a laborious process. Forty‑two pages later, I finally reached the listings for Henri Fantin‑Latour’s portraits exhibited in the Salon of 1882. Thanks to modern search engines, I was able to locate their full titles and confirm through museum exhibition records that they correspond to the two portraits listed in the Salon catalogue. In both cases, the final initial represented the sitter’s surname:
Henri Fantin-Latour
no. 1007 — Portrait de Mme H. L… (Portrait de Madame Henri Lerolle — Cleveland Museum of Art)
no. 1008 — Portrait de Mme L. M… (Portrait de Madame Léon Maître — Brooklyn Museum)
As an example of how hyphenated names are abbreviated, Henri Fantin‑Latour’s own name could appear as:
M. H. F.L…, M. H. F.-L…, or M. H. FL…
In our case, the initials in Portrait de M. L. A… should represent “M.” for Monsieur, a single forename beginning with “L,” and a single surname beginning with “A.”
An illustrated catalogue for the Salon of 1882 recorded the same title:“520 CEZANNE (P.). Portrait de M. L. A…” Catalogue Illustré du Salon — F.-G. Dumas (François‑Guillaume), Paris: Librairie d’Art, L. Baschet, p. XXVI
Among the important resources I eventually located online was a copy of the Dictionnaire Véron,which contains the only known first‑hand description of Portrait de M. L. A…, written by Théodore Véron in his report on the Salon of 1882. I had hoped it might offer more information than what had been reported in English by Rewald and others; it did not. But it did preserve the original French text:
“CEZANNE (Paul) ‘M. L. A.’ est assez largement brossé dans la pâte.
L’ombre de l’orbite et celle de la joue droite promettent, avec la qualité de ton des lumières, un coloriste dans l’avenir.”
(Dictionnaire Véron - Chez M. Bazin - Paris, 1882 p. 113)
Because Véron’s critical vocabulary is highly idiomatic and rooted in 19th‑century painterly terminology, a calibrated translation is necessary: “‘M. L. A.’ is painted with broad, full brushwork in thick paint. The shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek, together with the truth of the tones in the lighted areas, reveal the promise of a future colorist.”
Translator’s notes: “brossé” — in 19th‑century criticism, implies broad, confident handling of the brush.
“dans la pâte” — refers to thick, loaded paint (impasto), not simply “in the paint.”
“qualité de ton des lumières” — describes the truth and harmony of tones in the illuminated passages, not “highlights” in the modern sense.
“promettent… un coloriste dans l’avenir” — a standard critical formula indicating emerging mastery of color.
Taken together, the 1882 Salon catalogue and Véron’s brief notice provide the only contemporary documentation for Portrait de M. L. A…. The title appears exactly as printed — with spaced initials and terminal ellipsis — and Véron’s description offers a concise but technically informed glimpse of the painting as it was seen in 1882. Later writers would revisit the entry, sometimes altering the spacing or order of the initials, which becomes significant only when such rearrangements are used to propose full names for the sitter.
Théodore Duret (1906)
Following the comments published in the Dictionnaire Véron in 1882, it would be twenty‑four years before Théodore Duret became the next writer to comment on Cézanne and the Salon of 1882, although he did so without mentioning Portrait de M. L. A… by name.
“Cézanne philosophically accepted the contempt to which he was subjected. The idea never occurred to him, even for a moment, to modify his manner in any way in order to come closer to common taste. Once withdrawn from public contact by renouncing participation in exhibitions, he painted without concern for what might be happening around him. When we say that he renounced participating in exhibitions, this applies strictly to the Impressionist exhibitions, which he ceased to attend after 1877. There is, however, one exception. In 1882, rekindling his desire to enter the Salons, he sent a man’s portrait to the Salon that year. Guillemet, one of his friends from his apprenticeship in Paris and then a member of the jury, had it accepted. The Salon of 1882 was thus the only one that, by chance, saw a work by Cézanne.”
French original:
“Cézanne prit philosophiquement son parti du mépris dont il était l’objet. L’idée ne lui vint pas un seul instant de modifier en quoi que ce soit sa manière, pour se rapprocher du goût commun. Une fois retiré du contact public par la renonciation de participer aux expositions, il peint sans s’inquiéter de ce qui peut se passer autour de lui. Quand nous disons qu’il a renoncé à participer aux expositions, cela s’applique en effet rigoureusement aux expositions des Impressionnistes auxquelles il manque après 1877, mais il existe cependant une exception. Repris en 1882 de son désir de pénétrer aux Salons, il envoya un portrait d’homme au Salon de cette année. Guillemet, un de ses amis des temps d’apprentissage à Paris, alors membre du jury, le fit recevoir. Le Salon de 1882 a été ainsi le seul qui, par aventure, ait vu une œuvre de Cézanne.”
(Histoire des Peintres Impressionnistes — H. Floury, Paris, 1906, pp. 184–85)
("a man's portrait")
Notes on the Translation
(light touch, as appropriate for a 1906 secondary source)
“prit philosophiquement son parti” — literally “philosophically took his side of it,” idiomatically “accepted philosophically.”
“sa manière” — Cézanne’s manner/style; “manner” is correct and period‑appropriate.
“par aventure” — literally “by adventure,” idiomatically “by chance” or “as it happened.”
“portrait d’homme” — correctly rendered as “a man’s portrait.”
Several years later, in 1910, Duret revisited the subject of the Salon of 1882:
“Cézanne regarded the scorn of which he was the object with much philosophy. The idea of modifying his style in any particular, in order to accommodate himself to the average taste, never occurred to him for a single moment. When once he had withdrawn from contact with the public and ceased to take part in exhibitions, he painted without any preoccupation as to what was going on round about him. When we say that he ceased to take part in exhibitions, the statement is strictly true of the exhibitions of the Impressionists, from which he was always absent after 1877, but otherwise there was one exception. In 1882, the desire to force his way into the official exhibition again took hold of him, and accordingly he sent a man’s portrait to the Salon of that year. Guillemet, one of the friends of his student days in Paris, was then a member of the jury, and secured its acceptance. By this chance the Salon of 1882 was the only one to which a work of Cézanne’s was ever admitted.”
(Manet and the French Impressionists — J. B. Lippincott Company, 1910, pp. 184–185)
(“a man’s portrait”)"
James Huneker (1910)
In 1910, James Huneker also mentioned the Salon of 1882:
"The amazing part of it all is that he produced for more than thirty years and seldom sold a canvas, seldom exhibited. His solitary appearance at an official salon was in 1882, and he would not have succeeded then if it had not been for his friend Guillaumin[sic], a member of the selecting jury, who claimed his rights and passed in, amid execrations, both mock and real, a portrait by Cezanne."
(Promenades of An Impressionist - Charles Scribner's Sons - New York, 1910 p. 8)
("a portrait")
Frederick Lawton (1911)
Frederick Lawton knew the story in 1911:
"Unrebuffed and undismayed by the lack of approval and the hostility encountering his efforts to express in his own way the art to which he had bound himself, Cézanne continued to paint in and about Paris, and later in the retirement of his Aix residence, now and again making a fresh attempt to get into the Salon, and still being refused entrance. There was one exception in 1882, when a portrait he offered was hung through the good offices of his whilom confrére and companion Guillemet, who happened to be on the Committee".
(The Art Journal - London Virtue - 1911 p. 57)
("a portrait")
Charles Louis Borgmeyer (1913)
Charles Louis Borgmeyer knew the story in 1913:
“It was perhaps he who among the impressionists was most criticised. He was so badly treated, so misunderstood, that he gave up in despair after exhibiting a few times with them, and withdrew from all public exhibitions, with one exception. In 1882 he sent a portrait to the Salon, and for the first and only time was accepted, probably through his friendship with Guillaudin [sic], who was on the jury.”
(The Master Impressionists - The Fine Arts Press - Chicago, 1913 p. 134)
("a portrait")
André Leclerc (1914)
Writer André Leclerc added another small clue in 1914:
“The Salon continued to ignore Cézanne until 1882, when the influence of a friend he had on the jury, the painter Guillemet, allowed him to obtain entry for a small portrait.” (Cézanne — Editions Hyperion, English text, 1914, p. 11)
French original: “Le Salon continue à ignorer Cézanne jusqu’en 1882, lorsque l’influence d’un ami qu’il a dans le jury, le peintre Guillemet, lui permet d’obtenir l’entrée pour un petit portrait.” (“a small portrait”)
Gustave Coquiot (1914)
Gustave Coquiot also joined the conversation in 1914:
But, despite these tributes, Cézanne would have liked to be received at the official Salon — at Bouguereau’s Salon, as he called it. To ‘astonish Aix’ and also to ‘annoy Bouguereau,’ M. Vollard tells us. Refused all the time (the dry guillotine, Cézanne said), he nevertheless had the pleasure, in 1882, of annoying Bouguereau by appearing at the official Salon with a portrait of a man, thanks, it is true, to his friend Guillemet, who, as a member of the jury, passed Cézanne’s canvas by presenting it as the work of one of his students.”
(Paul Cézanne — Librairie Paul Ollendorff, Paris, 1914–19, pp. 87–88)
French original: “Mais, malgré ces hommages, Cézanne eût voulu être reçu au Salon officiel, au salon de Bouguereau, comme il disait. Pour ‘épater Aix’ et aussi pour ‘em… Bouguereau’ nous dit M. Vollard. Refusé tout le temps (la guillotine sèche, disait Cézanne), il eut tout de même le plaisir, en 1882, d’em… donc Bouguereau, en figurant au Salon officiel, avec un Portrait d’homme, grâce, il est vrai, à son ami Guillemet, qui, faisant partie du jury, imposa la toile de Cézanne comme étant l’œuvre d’un de ses élèves.”
("a portrait of a Man")
Ambroise Vollard (1914)
The “Vollard” mentioned by Coquiot was Ambroise Vollard, and of all the writers who have discussed the Salon of 1882 or Portrait de M. L. A…, Vollard stands apart. He knew Cézanne personally during the painter’s final years, and he himself endured more than one hundred sittings for his own portrait.
Vollard was also the first Paris art dealer to organize a one‑man exhibition of Cézanne’s paintings in 1895. Yet what truly distinguishes Vollard’s comments on Portrait de M. L. A… from those of all other writers is his close working relationship with Cézanne and with the painter’s son, Paul Jr., as well as the fact that he personally handled a large number of Cézanne’s paintings — most acquired either directly from the artist or from his estate.
In 1914 Ambroise Vollard wrote:
Calibrated English Translation (restoring Vollard’s tone)
"Undeterred, Cézanne sent two paintings to the Salon each year, always rejected, when suddenly, in 1882, he had the joy of learning that one of his submissions, a portrait, had just been accepted! But it must be added that he entered the Salon through the back door. His friend Guillemet, who was a member of the jury and had tried in vain to save him in the second round, had taken him "for his charity": any member of the jury then had the privilege of admitting the painting of one of his students to the Salon, without any examination.
The booklet for the 1882 Salon therefore bears this note on page 46: Cézanne Paul, student of Mr. Guillemet, Portrait of M. L. A.
Later, in a sense of equality, this sovereign right was taken away from the jury, which deprived Cézanne of his only chance of being received a second time at Bouguereau's salon."
(Paul Cézanne — Paris: Galerie A. Vollard, 1914, pp. 48, 50)
French Original (verbatim)
“Sans se décourager, Cézanne dirigeait, chaque année, vers le Salon deux toiles, toujours refusées, lorsque soudain, en 1882, il eut la joie d’apprendre qu’un de ses envois, un portrait, venait d’être reçu! Mais il faut ajouter qu’il entrait au Salon par la petite porte. Son ami Guillemet, qui faisait partie du jury, et avait vainement tenté de le repêcher au second tour, l’avait pris ‘pour sa charité’: tout membre du jury ayant alors le privilège de faire entrer au Salon la toile d’un de ses élèves, sans aucun examen. Le livret du Salon de 1882 porte donc cette mention, page 46: Cézanne Paul, élève de M. Guillemet, Portrait de M. L. A. Plus tard, dans un sentiment d’égalité, on ôta au jury ce droit régalien, ce qui enleva à Cézanne sa seule chance d’être reçu une seconde fois au salon de Bouguereau.”
Translator’s Notes (light, only where needed)
“par la petite porte” — literally “through the small door,” idiomatically “through the back door,” meaning unofficially or by special privilege.
“pour sa charité” — Vollard’s ironic phrasing; “for his charity” preserves the tone.
“droit régalien” — literally “regalian right,” meaning a sovereign privilege; “sovereign right” keeps the flavor without sounding archaic.
These notes preserve Vollard’s sly, anecdotal tone without over‑explaining.
("a portrait" - "Portrait de M. L. A.")
Unlike Duret, Huneker, Lawton, Borgmeyer, Leclerc, and Coquiot, Vollard’s comments included his source — "The booklet for the 1882 Salon", — and the title of the painting.
Vollard’s narrative also overturned what I had understood up to that point with the revelation: "His friend Guillemet, who was serving on the Jury, and who tried in vain to get Cézanne's canvas accepted on the second vote, had put it through "pour sa charité".
I had always assumed that Guillemet had simply given Cézanne the opportunity to select the painting to be submitted as his pupil, whereas Vollard specifies that the painting was one Cézanne had submitted in his own name, and that it was only brought in as Guillemet’s pupil after failing the second vote of the jury.
As a businessman, Vollard was inquisitive and resourceful; indeed, it was this resourcefulness that had allowed him to track down Cézanne and his paintings in the first place.
Given that no friends or family ever commented on the identity of the painting, and that many writers published accounts without defining their sources, the fact that Vollard is the first writer in thirty‑two years to mention both the 1882 Salon catalogue and the title Portrait de M. L. A… is significant. Yet it also seems apparent that the description published in the Dictionnaire Véron had not yet been discovered.
Ambroise Vollard (1919)
Five years later, in 1919, Vollard revised his comments on Portrait de M. L. A… by adding a footnote:
Calibrated English Translation
“Despite all my efforts, I have been completely unable to discover either the full name of the model of this painting, or — more importantly — what the painting itself actually was.”
(Paul Cézanne — Georges Crès & Cie, Zurich, 1919, pp. 63–64)
French Original (verbatim)
"Malgré tous mes efforts, il m’a été absolument impossible de découvrir ni le nom complet du modèle de ce tableau, ni surtout ce qu’était au juste ce tableau lui-même."
Translator’s Notes (light)
“au juste” — literally “exactly,” but here meaning “what the painting actually was,” preserving Vollard’s tone of exasperated uncertainty.
The phrasing “ni surtout” (“nor above all”) signals Vollard’s emphasis: the identity of the painting troubled him more than the identity of the sitter.
(“unable to identify the model or the painting”)
It appears that Vollard first learned of Portrait de M. L. A… around 1914, when he mentioned it for the first time, and that he then spent the next five years attempting to identify it. Although Vollard was a shrewd businessman, it is unlikely that his efforts to trace the painting were motivated solely by the possibility of commanding a premium price. His close relationship with Cézanne, his dealings with Paul Jr., and his long experience handling the artist’s works suggest a deeper personal and professional interest in resolving the mystery.
It is understandable that Vollard, as Cézanne’s former business associate and friend, would have cherished the idea of owning the artist’s only painting ever accepted by the Salon. Knowing Cézanne as he did — knowing how the painter had struggled for nearly two decades to be exhibited there, and how difficult the decision to submit a work must have been — we can appreciate Vollard’s desire to learn which painting Cézanne had chosen.
Given Vollard’s longstanding professional relationship with Paul Cézanne Jr., it is striking that not even the artist’s son could assist him in identifying Portrait de M. L. A…. Yet if Paul Jr. did not know, he was apparently not alone. With the obvious exception of Antoine Guillemet, no one among Cézanne’s family or friends appears to have been aware that a painting had been exhibited in the Salon of 1882 — much less which work it might have been.
Vollard mentions Antoine Guillemet in his remarks on Portrait de M. L. A…, but he does not indicate whether he ever consulted the one person who could have resolved the question. Had Vollard asked Guillemet to identify the painting and been refused, he would almost certainly have recorded the exchange.
Vollard was acquainted with Guillemet as early as 1897, when he encountered him with Cézanne in the Luxembourg:
“What Cézanne said about Manet seemed like jokes. One day, however, when chance brought me to meet him in the Luxembourg, in front of the Olympia, I thought he was going to express himself fully about his ‘colleague.’ Cézanne was accompanied by Guillemet: ‘My friend Guillemet,’ he told me, ‘wanted to show me the Olympia again…’”
(Paul Cézanne — Georges Crès & Cie, Zurich, 1919, p. 44)
Guillemet died in 1918, so during the years in which Vollard was attempting “to discover either the full name of the model who posed for this picture, or just which canvas the name is supposed to refer to,” he likely had ample opportunity to consult him.
After Guillemet, Camille Pissarro and Armand Guillaumin were the two friends most likely to have been aware of the painting eventually hung in the Salon of 1882. Pissarro died in 1903, long before Vollard became aware of Portrait de M. L. A….
Guillaumin lived until 1927, and in his biography of Armand Guillaumin, Christopher Gray notes:
“In 1896–97 Vollard published two Albums des Peintres‑Graveurs, but they were hardly more than a collection of prints by those contemporary artists he could persuade to contribute. Both contained works by Guillaumin as well as Pissarro. Guillaumin had, of course, experimented with graphic techniques in 1873 when he had done a series of etchings with Pissarro, Gachet, and Cézanne. Though he had not continued his graphic work, Vollard persuaded him to try lithography. Guillaumin approached the use of the lithographic crayon in much the same spirit in which he approached pastel, though the limitations of the technique restricted his range of colors.”
(Armand Guillaumin — The Pequot Press, 1972, p. 55)
Thus, although Vollard was acquainted with both Guillemet and Guillaumin, he does not mention having asked either of them about the identity of Portrait de M. L. A….
Taken together, Vollard’s remarks form the most detailed early attempt to understand the painting Cézanne submitted to the Salon of 1882. He was the first writer to cite the 1882 Salon booklet, the first to reproduce the catalogue entry, and the first to name the painting as Portrait de M. L. A…. Yet even with his long acquaintance with Cézanne, his dealings with Paul Jr., and his familiarity with the artist’s work, Vollard ultimately admitted that he could not identify either the model or the painting. His comments reveal both the persistence of the mystery and the extent to which knowledge of the 1882 submission had already faded from the memories of Cézanne’s family, friends, and colleagues.
Tristan Klingsor (1923)
Tristan Klingsor arrived in 1923, offering a curiously indulgent portrait of the Cézanne household:
"If he wasn't particularly well-received in Aix, at least his family tolerated him. He had confided his desires and ambitions to his mother several times. Even the old banker, in his paternal pride, couldn't believe his son incapable of being a good painter. And then, by an unforeseen stroke of luck, Cézanne had a portrait accepted at the official Salon of 1882. In truth, he owed this solely to Guillemet. The latter, a member of the jury that year, had the right to select a painting from among the rejected works: he chose Cézanne's. I don't know if he appreciated it; in any case, he showed himself on this occasion to be the kind colleague who doesn't forget a childhood friend; and one can be sure that this fortunate turn of events must not have been unpleasant for the exile from Aix."
(Tristan Klingsor, Cézanne, Paris: Rieder, 1923, p. 33)
French Original (verbatim)
“S'il n'est pas davantage goûté à Aix, du moins les siens le tolèrent. Il a confié plusieurs fois ses désirs et ses ambitions à sa mère. Le vieux banquier lui‑même dans son orgueil paternel ne peut croire son fils incapable d'être un bon peintre. Et voici que par un hasard imprévu Cézanne a un portrait reçu au Salon officiel de 1882. À la vérité, il doit cela uniquement à Guillemet. Celui‑ci, membre du jury cette année‑là, avait le droit de repêcher une toile parmi les refusées : il fit choix de celle de Cézanne. Je ne sais s'il l'appréciait ; en tout cas il se montra en cette occasion le bon confrère qui n'oublie pas un camarade de jeunesse ; et l'on peut être assuré que cet accident heureux ne dut pas être désagréable à l'exilé d'Aix.”
(“a portrait accepted at the Salon of 1882 through Guillemet’s intervention”)
Klingsor’s account preserves the familiar narrative of Guillemet’s intervention at the Salon of 1882, but like all earlier writers, he offers no information about the identity of the painting or its sitter. His emphasis remains anecdotal and biographical, focusing on Cézanne’s family, ambitions, and the unexpected good fortune of the acceptance. The painting itself remains unnamed, undescribed, and unlocated.
Two early Cézanne writers, Georges Rivière and Lionello Venturi, would later propose that the painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882 had been a self‑portrait. How they arrived at this idea is unclear, as no earlier writer had suggested it. Rivière is the first to introduce the hypothesis in 1923, followed by Venturi in 1936.
Georges Rivière (1923)
In 1923 Georges Rivière mentioned the Salon of 1882 twice:
(p. 93) – Twenty Years of Silence
After the 1877 exhibition, the public did not see, for nearly twenty years, any paintings by Paul Cézanne, and no newspaper printed his name. If Guillemet, exercising the right granted to him as a member of the jury, managed to get his friend into the 1882 Salon, no one noticed the portrait, certainly small in size, which, presumably by order, the exhibition commissioners placed in such a way that no one could discover it.
(p. 93) - Vingt Ans De Silence
Après l’exposition de 1877, le public ne revit plus, pendant près de vingt ans, de tableaux de Paul Cézanne et aucun journal n’imprima son nom. Si Guillemet, usant du droit que lui donnait sa qualité de membre du Jury, réussit à faire entrer son ami au Salon de 1882, personne ne remarqua le portrait, de petite dimension certainement, que, par ordre sans doute, les commissaires de l’exposition placérent de telle manière qu’aucun régard ne pouvait le découvrir.
(p. 210) - Chronological Classification Essay of Some Works by Paul Cézanne 1882 - Portrait of Cézanne by himself - Exhibited at the Salon of 1882
(p. 210) - Classification chronologique de quelques œuvres de Paul Cézanne 1882 - Portrait de Cézanne par lui-même - Exposé au Salon de 1882.
(Le Maitre Paul Cézanne 1923 pp. 93, 210)
(Rivière appears to agree with Leclerc that it had been a small portrait, and adds the first reference to a self-portrait: "Portrait de Cézanne par lui-même")
In 1933 Rivière mentioned the Salon of 1882 twice again:
(p. 125) For many years, Cézanne was rarely seen in Paris. When he was there, his social interactions were limited to a small number of friends. He did not exhibit anywhere, because we must not take into account the small canvas - his portrait - which was received at the Salon of 1882 and which no one remembers.
(p. 125) Pendant un grand nombre d'années, on ne vit guère Cézanne à Paris. Quand il y était, ses relations étaient restreintes à un petit nombre d'amis. Il n'exposait nulle part, car il ne faut pas tenir compte de la petite toile - son portrait - qui fut reçue au Salon de 1882 et dont personne n'a gardé le souvenir.
(p. 133) In 1881, he painted his portrait, which was accepted at the 1882 Salon. No one could ever see it in the dark corner where it was maliciously placed.
(p. 133) En 1881, il exécuta son portrait, reçu au Salon de 1882. Personne ne put jamais l'apercevoir dans le coin sombre où il fut malicieusement placé.
(Cezanne: Le Peintre Solitaire – 1933 pp. 125, 133)
(Rivière again refers to "the small canvas", and changes his wording from "Portrait de Cézanne par lui-même", to the more ambiguous description "son portrait," adding it had been executed in 1881.)
Where this self‑portrait theory originated is unclear. The title as published in the Salon catalogue was common knowledge by then, so had Rivière interpreted the “L. A.” as l’Artiste with the assumption that the “M.” had arbitrarily been added to the portrait of a man which was titled simply l’Artiste? Many 19th‑century painters used that exact phrasing—Portrait de l’Artiste—as the standard title for their self‑portraits, and the Salon catalogues of the period contain numerous examples. If Rivière was accustomed to seeing self‑portraits labeled in that conventional way, the initials “M. L. A…” may have seemed to him a typographic distortion of a familiar formula rather than a reference to an actual sitter.
I have made it a point to think outside the box in my studies, and I may be the first researcher to examine the abbreviated Salon catalogue listings systematically to determine how the names in the portrait titles were constructed.
Many portraits were by little‑known artists, so finding the full titles of those paintings was impossible. Yet the examples I did locate were straightforward: they began with the abbreviated honorifics M., Mme, or Mlle, followed by one or more initials that were appropriately spaced, and ended with the surname initial immediately followed by three or more points of suspension “...”.
Given Cézanne’s long history of rejection by the Salon juries, it is entirely possible that the catalogue committee might have added the honorific Monsieur to create a title such as Portrait de Monsieur l’Artiste, which would in effect be a parody. But to then mis‑abbreviate l’Artiste would render the parody unapparent, undermining the very point of the joke.
As far as I can tell from studying the catalogue abbreviations, they were used only for selected portrait subjects’ names. A painting titled l’Artiste or Portrait de l’Artiste—a standard formulation for self‑portraits in the nineteenth century—would have been left unabbreviated.
As for the unexplained theory that the 1882 submission had been a self‑portrait dating to 1881, we know from Véron’s description that there is no plausible known self‑portrait from that period. The evidence Rivière had before him did not support the claim, and the typographic conventions of the Salon catalogue do not support it either.
Taken together, the catalogue evidence leaves Rivière’s interpretation without support and returns the question of the 1882 submission to the documentary record itself, where the next generation of writers would attempt to address it.
Gerstle Mack (1935)
Another biographer who wrote about Portrait de M. L. A... was Gerstle Mack, who in 1935 added yet another theory to be pondered regarding the possible identity of the sitter, as well as mentioning the self-portrait theory of Georges Rivière, which he subsequently disagreed with. This was one of the first accounts of the lost portrait I had found when my studies began in 1988, and the most detailed.
Gerstle Mack wrote:
"One of the things that drew Cézanne back to Paris that spring was the assurance that at last his lifelong ambition was about to be realized: he was actually going to have a picture in the Salon! But the admittance of a canvas by Cézanne into the sacred precincts of the “Salon de Bouguereau” did not mean that that conservative institution had suddenly undergone a change of heart. It happened that in 1882 Antoine Guillemet was a member of the jury; and according to the ruling then in force, each member had the privilege of introducing into the Salon one picture which was exempt from challenge by the jury. Such works were said to be accepted pour la charité — an unflattering phrase, but one that expressed quite frankly the contemptuous spirit in which these pictures were admitted. A painting received in this way was supposed to be the work of a pupil of the member of the jury who sponsored it. Of course Cézanne could not by any stretch of the imagination have been considered a pupil of Guillemet; but the rules were not very strictly enforced, and the good-natured Guillemet was able to “wangle” his friend’s canvas into the Salon “pour la charité.”
It might be imagined that Cézanne, sensitive as he was, would have felt deeply humiliated by this undignified subterfuge. But he had had his heart set on seeing one of his pictures in the Salon for so many years that he was not inclined to boggle at such an opportunity to gain admission. He knew that there was no hope of being accepted in the regular way: he had been rejected too many times for him to have any illusions left in that direction. The only possible way to achieve his ambition was to avail himself of Guillemet’s intervention, and he accepted the sop gratefully.
In fact there is good reason to believe that Cézanne himself had suggested the manoeuvre to Guillemet, and that the possibility of entering the Salon by what Vollard aptly calls “‘ the back door ”’ — since the front door was closed to him — had been in his mind for some time. Guillemet had made repeated efforts to induce successive juries to accept one of Cézanne’s pictures officially, but without success. Cézanne knew of these attempts: as early as June 3, 1879 he had written to Zola: "Perhaps you know that I have paid a little insinuative visit to our friend Guillemet, who, they say, has recommended me to the jury —alas, without any response from those hard-hearted judges.”
Why “insinuative,” unless Cézanne, knowing that Guillemet was likely to be awarded a place on the jury within the next year or two, had proposed, or at any rate agreed to, the teacher-and-pupil solution that was finally adopted?
And on August 22, 1880 Zola wrote to Guillemet from Médan:
“Paul . . . is still counting on you for you know what. He has told me about the pleasant morning you spent together. And I am requested to send you his most affectionate greetings.”
Zola’s discreet “ you know what ” might mean almost anything, but there is little doubt that it refers to Guillemet’s promise to facilitate Cézanne’s admission to the Salon.
Cézanne was not an admirer of Guillemet’s facile and mediocre painting, and probably he made no great effort to conceal his opinion, but his lack of enthusiasm for his benefactor’s work seems to have had no effect on the warm personal friendship between the two men.
Guillemet, whose own painting was intentionally modified to suit the popular taste, was nevertheless sincerely happy to be of service to his uncompromising and unappreciated colleague; and Cézanne had no scruples about accepting the patronage of any painter, good, bad, or indifferent, who could get him into the Salon.
"If Cézanne was naïve enough to suppose that the mere hanging of one of his pictures in the official Salon would ipso facto bring him the recognition he desired, he was speedily disillusioned. For all the notice taken of his exhibit the wall space it occupied might as well have been left bare. In fact so little attention was paid to this picture, so inconspicuously placed among hundreds of others, that its very identity is uncertain. Rivière says that it was a self-portrait, but this is contradicted by the entry in the official catalogue:
"Cézanne (Paul), né à Aix(Bouches-du_Rhône), élève de M. Guillemet. -- Rue de l'Ouest, 32. 520 --- Portrait de M. L. A—"
Who was Monsieur L. A—? It may have been Louis Aubert, the painter’s godfather and maternal uncle; I have been unable to find any other acquaintance of Cézanne’s whose name begins with those initials. But this is only a plausible suggestion; a positive identification of the sitter appears to be impossible, especially as the fate of the picture itself is unknown.
After this empty victory Cézanne abandoned his long and persistent siege of the Salon. He resigned himself to obscurity; but even if he had wanted to make another attempt to force himself into the Palais des Champs-Flysées, the way was now barred. Shortly after 1882 the privilege accorded to members of the jury of sponsoring pictures pour la charité was withdrawn. Thenceforth all paintings were obliged to pass the jury."
(Paul Cézanne - Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1935 pp. 269-272) (mentions Rivière's self-portrait theory - offers the artist's uncle Louis Aubert as a plausible suggestion)
*Gerstle Mack had been the first writer to interpret the title as "Monsieur L. A—", the first to mention correspondences between Cézanne, Zola, and Guillemet, and the theory that the artist himself had suggested the teacher-student arrangement.
Lionello Venturi (1936)
In 1936 Lionello Venturi also added an unusual theory:
21. 1875-77 Portrait De Paul Cézanne
“Brown background. Pink flesh. Beard and brown hair. Following an indication of Mr. Paul Cézanne Jr., it would be a portrait of the painter. The workmanship is absolutely academic. This painting does not, however, belong to the painter's first period, but at his maturity (1875-77); his lack of personal style would come from the fact that the painting was made to be admitted to the Salon. Would we be in the presence of the painting that Guillemet brought into the Salon of 1882? (Vo. 14, p. 63). In the uncertainty we classified this portrait with those of the painter's first style, to which he is similar in style.”
21. 1875-77 Portrait De Paul Cézanne
"Fond brun. Chairs roses. Barbe et cheveux d’un blond châtain. Suivant une indication de M. Paul Cézanne fils, il s’agirait d’un portrait du peintre. La facture en est absolument académique. Ce tableau n’appartiendrait toutefois pas à la premiére époque du peintre, mais à sa maturité (1875-77); son manque de style personnel viendrait du fait que le tableau a été fait pour être admis au Salon. Serions-nous en présence du tableau que Guillemet fit entrer au Salon de 1882? (Vo. 14, p. 63). Dans l'incertitude nous avons classé ce portrait avec ceux de la premiére maniére du peintre, dont il se rapproche par le style."
(Cézanne Son Art — Son Oeuvre, P. Rosenberg 1936 p. 72)
(A self-portrait)
Venturi's suggestion that #21 is a self-portrait from 1875-77 is surprising, not only does it obviously look like a portrait from the dark period of the early 1860s, it looks nothing like the self-portraits of 1875-77, by which time the artist was balding.
The online catalogue lists Venturi's title "Portrait de Paul Cézanne" as an alternate title, and includes his original dating of 1875-77 for Venturi 21, with the online catalogue retitling the portrait FWN 392 "Tête d'homme" and revising the dating to 1862–64 which Venturi eventually settled on.
The online catalogue added the note; "The sitter seems to be the same as in Portrait d'homme, 1862–64 (FWN 391)", but makes no mention of Venturi having theorized the painting (FWN 392) had been the one exhibited in the Salon of 1882.
As a longtime researcher of the painting which had been lost and unidentified for a century except for Venturi's theory, I found this to be a glaring omission, or perhaps indication that an early expert's opinion, right or wrong, was being suppressed.
The online catalogue often lists dozens of published references for paintings, and yet while Venturi's catalogue is listed for FWN 392, his theory referring to the historic painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882, the only specific painting ever mentioned in a published reference to the Salon of 1882 in over a century, didn't even rate a note.
Both Rivière and Venturi mentioned the painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882 with the assistance of Guillemet, but neither of them referred to the title Portrait de M. L. A…, which, taken at face value, requires an explanation of the initials in order to reconcile it with their self‑portrait theories.
Sources or reasoning for their comments would have been helpful—whether they relied on hearsay, recollection, or assumptions—but neither writer provided any.
The title from the Salon catalogue notwithstanding, Venturi’s choice of Portrait d’homme seems to indicate that he was unaware of the description published in the Dictionnaire Véron, which contains specific details that do not correspond to that painting.
With Véron’s description in mind, a more appropriate small self‑portrait candidate would seem to be Portrait de l’artiste au fond rose (c. 1875, FWN 436). Like several other portraits from this period, it is unsigned, and its handling of paint, shadows, and tonal structure aligns more closely with the features Véron described.
John Rewald (1939)
John Rewald’s Cézanne: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Son Amitié pour Zola (1939) marks the first time the Dictionnaire Véron description of Portrait de M. L. A… entered Cézanne scholarship. Prior to this publication, neither Rivière nor Venturi had cited Véron’s text, and no contemporary description of the 1882 Salon submission had been reproduced in print.
Because Rewald’s 1939 volume is the earliest source to quote Véron directly, the French text is presented first, followed by a calibrated English rendering.
French Text (Rewald 1939, pp. 270–271)
(Presented exactly as printed in the 1939 edition.)
En 1879, Antoine Guillemet, membre du jury, tenta tout pour patronner Cézanne auprès du jury, "hélas! sans retour de la part de ces juges au cœur dur". C’est seulement en 1882 que Guillemet réussit à faire "accepter" une toile de Cézanne, usant du droit de tout membre du jury de faire, d'autorité, entrer au Salon une œuvre d'un de ses élèves; Cézanne, qui exposa un "Portrait de Monsieur L.A.", figure donc au catalogue de ce Salon comme "élève d'Antoine Guillemet."
Ce droit fut supprimé à partir de cette même année et Guillemet ne pourra plus prendre un tableau de son ami "pour sa charité", comme on disait alors. En 1884 Cézanne recommandera de nouveau son envoi — un portrait — à l’ami Guillemet, mais, privé de son privilège, celui-ci écrira à Zola : "Hélas, cette tête a été refusée!" Cependant quelques années plus tard, M. Chocquet réussira, par d’habiles manœuvres, à faire accepter une toile de Cézanne à l’Exposition universelle de 1889 (1).
D’ailleurs, ces tableaux, exposés en 1882 et en 1889, ne furent nullement remarqués par le public et la critique. C’est tout juste si un critique constata à propos de l’envoi de "l’élève d’Antoine Guillemet", qu’il prit sans doute pour un débutant : "M. L. A." est assez largement brossé dans la pâte. L’ombre de l'orbite et celle de la joue droite promettent, avec la qualité de ton des lumières, un coloriste dans l'avenir (2). (1) Le tableau de Cézanne exposé en 1882 fut, d’après M. Conil, un portrait de l’Oncle Dominique (le catalogue indique : Portrait de M. L. A...), tandis que la toile de la Coll. Chocquet, exposée en 1889, était : La Maison du Pendu. (2) Dictionnaire Véron, Salon de 1882, p. 113.
English Rendering (calibrated translation)
The following English text is a calibrated translation by the author, based on the French printed in Rewald (1939).
In 1879, Antoine Guillemet, a member of the jury, tried everything to support Cézanne before the jury, “alas! without response from these hard‑hearted judges.” It was only in 1882 that Guillemet succeeded in having a painting by Cézanne “accepted,” using the right of any jury member to admit, by authority, a work by one of his students to the Salon. Cézanne, who exhibited a “Portrait of Monsieur L.A.,” therefore appears in the catalogue of that Salon as “a student of Antoine Guillemet.”
This right was abolished that same year, and Guillemet could no longer take a painting from his friend “for his charity,” as was said at the time. In 1884 Cézanne again recommended his submission—a portrait—to his friend Guillemet, but deprived of his privilege, the latter wrote to Zola: “Alas, this head has been refused!” A few years later, however, M. Chocquet succeeded, through skillful maneuvers, in having a Cézanne painting accepted at the Universal Exhibition of 1889 (1).
Moreover, the paintings exhibited in 1882 and 1889 were not noticed at all by the public or the critics. Only one critic remarked on the submission of “the student of Antoine Guillemet,” whom he probably took for a beginner: “‘M. L. A.’ is quite broadly brushed in the paste. The shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek promise, with the quality of tone in the lights, a future colorist” (2).
(1) According to M. Conil, the Cézanne painting exhibited in 1882 was a portrait of Uncle Dominique (the catalogue states: Portrait de M. L. A…), while the canvas from the Chocquet Collection exhibited in 1889 was The House of the Hanged Man. (2) Dictionnaire Véron, Salon of 1882, p. 113.
Notes
* Rewald follows Gerstle Mack’s depiction of the initials as “Monsieur L.A.” This appears to be the first time the space between “L.” and “A.” is removed and the ellipsis omitted.
* The correctly formatted initials (“M. L. A…”) reappear in Rewald’s footnote.
* M. Conil’s assertion that the 1882 submission was a portrait of Uncle Dominique is difficult to reconcile with the fact that none of Cézanne’s ten portraits of Dominique Aubert are signed.
Rewald After 1939:
The English‑Language Accounts (1946–1950)
After the 1939 French publication in which John Rewald first introduced the Dictionnaire Véron description of Portrait de M. L. A…, he returned to the subject in several English‑language works. These later accounts repeat the essential narrative of Cézanne’s 1882 Salon submission but omit the footnotes and contextual details present in the 1939 edition.
John Rewald (1946)
The History of Impressionism (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946), pp. 365, 444.
Rewald briefly summarized Cézanne’s 1882 Salon acceptance in the context of the final Impressionist exhibition:
“Apparently Durand‑Ruel had not cared to invite Cézanne to this exhibition (the seventh and final Impressionist exhibition in 1882), not having yet manifested great interest in his work. But Cézanne would probably have refused to join the others, since he had in 1882, for the first time in his life, the satisfaction of being accepted at the Salon. After his works had been once more rejected, Guillemet made use of a prerogative granted all jury members, that of having admitted without discussion the work of one of their students. Consequently Cézanne’s name was accompanied in the catalogue by the note: ‘pupil of Guillemet.’”
Rewald also included a brief biographical entry for 1882:
“Admitted at the Salon as ‘pupil of Guillemet.’”
John Rewald (1948-1950)
Paul Cézanne (Spring Books, 1948), p. 191
Paul Cézanne: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1948), pp. 133, 218
The Ordeal of Paul Cézanne (Phoenix House, 1950), pp. 106–107, 177
In these later biographies, Rewald repeated the account of the 1882 Salon submission in a standardized English form. The footnotes from 1939 were omitted, and the initials appeared as “Monsieur L. A.” rather than “M. L. A…”.
Rewald wrote:
“In 1879 Antoine Guillemet, now a member of the jury, had done his best to have a painting by Cézanne accepted, but ‘alas, without bringing any change in the attitude of those hard‑hearted judges’.
It was only in 1882 that Guillemet managed to have a canvas of Cézanne’s ‘accepted’ by using his prerogative as a member of the jury to exhibit the work of one of his students. Cézanne, who had sent in a ‘Portrait of Monsieur L. A.’ is thus listed in the catalogue as a ‘pupil of Antoine Guillemet.’
But his portrait did not attract public attention, and a critic, taking the ‘pupil of Antoine Guillemet’ for a novice, wrote: ‘Monsieur L. A. is painted with wide brush‑strokes. The shadow of the eye‑socket and that of the right cheek as well as the quality of the light‑tones presage a future colourist.’
However, the prerogative which had opened the back door of the Salon to Cézanne was rescinded that same year, and Guillemet was no longer able to use his position on his friend’s behalf.”
A biographical outline entry for 1882 was also included:
“Is admitted to the Salon as ‘pupil’ of Guillemet; exhibits a portrait of a man.”
Notes
* These English‑language accounts derive from the 1939 French publication but omit the footnotes in which Rewald cited the Dictionnaire Véron and the Conil attribution to Uncle Dominique.
* The initials appear in these editions as “Monsieur L. A.” rather than the catalogue’s “M. L. A…”.
* The standardized English text remained in circulation through Rewald’s later biographies until the revisions of the 1960s and 1980s.
Lawrence Hanson (1960)
Lawrence Hanson’s Mortal Victory: A Biography of Paul Cézanne (1960) contains an unusual passage for its time, as it does not mention Portrait de M. L. A… by name. Hanson paraphrased the circumstances of Cézanne’s 1882 Salon acceptance and offered his own rendering of the Dictionnaire Véron description.
Hanson wrote:
“News came from Paris which sent him hurrying back. He had been accepted at the Salon. This triumph after nineteen years of unsuccessful trial was about as untriumphal as could possibly be. It was the result of pressure on Guillemet, again on the selection committee, by both Zola and Cézanne. ‘Paul is still counting on you’ Zola had reminded his friend more than a year earlier. And it was made possible only by a favor granted by the Salon to the members of the jury, that each should have the privilege of nominating one work without submitting it to the other members. A condition was attached. This work, accepted by the Salon ‘out of charity’ must be painted by a pupil of the nominator.
So, after nineteen years Cézanne was hung (very badly) in the Salon as a pupil of Guillemet, whose work he despised. And the exhibit, a portrait of his uncle, was noted patronizingly by the only critic to catch sight of it as the work of a promising young man who might in the course of time do quite well: ‘a colorist in embryo,’ he remarked.”
(Lawrence Hanson – Mortal Victory: A Biography of Paul Cézanne (1960), pp. 162-163.
Note:
Hanson’s reference to “a portrait of his uncle” appears to echo Gerstle Mack’s earlier mention of Louis Aubert, Cézanne’s godfather and maternal uncle. Based on the initials “M. L. A…”, Louis Aubert would have been a plausible candidate; however, no portraits of Louis Aubert by Cézanne are known.
John Rewald (1968)
Paul Cézanne: A Biography (Schocken Books, New York, 1968), pp. 133, 218. Rewald published another edition of his biography in 1968. The narrative concerning the 1882 Salon submission remained unchanged from the 1948 and 1950 editions. The only revision appears in the chronological outline, where the entry for 1882 was amended to include a reference to the self‑portrait theory:
“Admitted to the Salon as ‘pupil’ of Guillemet; exhibits a portrait of a man.” “Possibly a Self‑Portrait.”
Richard W. Murphy (1968)
Richard W. Murphy mentioned the Salon of 1882:
"He [Cezanne] did achieve one qualified success at the Salon in 1882. The painter Antoine Guillemet had become a member of the official jury and as such was entitled to submit a work by one of his pupils. Claiming Cézanne as one of his pupils, he got an oil accepted under the title Portrait of Monsieur *L.A. This work has since disappeared".
(The World of Cézanne 1839-1906 - Time Life Books, New York, 1968 p. 144)
(*The Salon catalogue has a space between the initials)
Jack Lindsay (1969)
Jack Lindsay provided yet another variation on Véron's description:
"So his Portrait de M. L. A. [Louie Aubert, his godfather?] was exhibited, and he was described as the pupil of the mediocre Guillemet. The only notice taken of the work was by a journalist of the Dictionnaire Véron, who saw in it a beginners work painted at great expense of colour: the shadow in the eye socket, and on the right cheek may give promise of a future colourist."
(Paul Cézanne, His Life and Art - New York Graphic Society, 1969)
Sir Lawrence Gowing (1983)
One hundred and one years after the Salon of 1882, the English artist, writer, curator and teacher Sir Lawrence Gowing declared the painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882 "unidentifiable".:
"The exclusion of Cezanne, once the very foundation of the Post-Impressionist edifice, does not imply a downgrading of his historical position. He is now in massive isolation; his style from 1880 is as isolated as that of Degas or Monet, who were also erstwhile Impressionists. And historically, the image of Cezanne's exclusion and isolation is a just one. In the 1880s, he withdrew from the Paris art scene: he did not exhibit there between 1877 and 1895 (apart from one painting, ironically now unidentifiable, at the Salon of 1882)".
(The Encyclopedia of Visual Art - Groiler Educational Corporation - Danbury, Conn. Vol. Five 1983 p. 804)
Sir Lawrence Gowing "Once, in 1882., his friend Antoine Guillemet used his privilege as a member of the Salon jury to exhibit a single canvas by his "pupil" Cezanne. The "pupil" was then 43, three years older than his "master". The picture went unnoticed."
(The Encyclopedia of Visual Art - Groiler Educational Corporation - Danbury, Conn. Vol. Six 1983 p. 116)
Richard Shiff (1984)
Art Historian Richard Shiff wrote:
"Cézanne's few public appearances of the period 1877-95 were not of great consequence. Through the intercession of Antoine Guillemet, he showed a portrait in the Salon of 1882 (Rewald, Paul Cézanne, p. 133). There was almost no critical comment, but one comprehensive reviewer briefly noted that his painting indicated "un coloriste dans l'avenir"; Théodore Véron, Dictionnaire Véron, Salon de 1882 (Paris, 1882), p. 113."
(Cézanne and the End of Impressionism - University of Chicago Press, 1984)
("a portrait")
Portrait de M. L. A... may have been unknown and unheard of by Cézanne's family and friends, but it obviously commanded the attention of all of these biographers and historians.
For over twenty years I had gathered what I could find amounting to about two-thirds of the current list. And while there were a few outlier comments such as André Leclerc mentioning it was "a small portrait" and Rivière and Venturi's comments that it had been "a self-portrait", all of the other comments seemed harmonious with the basic story I had learned in the first two biographies by Gerstle Mack and John Rewald.
And with the exception of Lionello Venturi's self-portrait theory, Portrait de M. L. A... was considered unidentifiable and no one else had attempted to attribute it to any known work.
And then out of nowhere, it became apparent that someone in the Cézanne art historical circle had decided to put an end to the speculation on the identity of Portrait de M. L. A....
Around 2010, in a routine online search for information relating to Portrait de M. L. A..., I located a chronology of the artist's career which indicated that the Portrait de M. L. A... exhibited in the Salon of 1882 had been attributed to a portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne!
I had studied the classic biographies of Cézanne written by the likes of Ambroise Vollard, Gerstle Mack, John Rewald, et al, and I could not recall Louis-Auguste being so much as mentioned as a possible sitter for Portrait de M. L. A....
The book mentioned by the online chronology was Sir Lawrence Gowing's Cézanne: The Early Years 1859 - 1872 (Harry N. Abrams 1988).
It did indeed contain the first instance of the Louis-Auguste attribution I had seen so far, where "Paris, Salon des Artistes français, 1882, no 502 ('Portrait de M.L.A....')" was listed at the top of the exhibition history following Gowing's catalogue notes on the painting which had been retitled for the catalogue Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, Father of the Artist, reading "L'Événement" (page 110).
Not only was the painting "The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement” 1866" retitled, the title 'Portrait de M. L. A...' from the Salon catalogue had been misrepresented by removing the spaces between the initials.
I was shocked, Gowing's catalogue was one of the first books I had bought on the works of Cézanne, it had just come out, and from it I had received a great introduction to the artist's early paintings. I purchased the book primarily for the catalogue and its many large color plates which were photographed in a manner which showed the brush and palette knife strokes. The historical photos and contributor essays were bonus content, much of it was the same information I had found in the biographies of Rewald and Mack.
I admit it was a while before I got around to reading the foreword, acknowledgements, editorial notes, introduction and essays, because the first two biographies I had read mentioned the lost portrait exhibited in the Salon of 1882, and in that early period of my studies, the first things I was looking for in every book was an index listing for Portrait de M. L. A..., the Salon of 1882, or a chronological entry for 1882.
No such listing is found in Sir Lawrence’s catalogue index for that title, and while the index list for the Salon featured the many years Cézanne was rejected, the Salon of 1882 which received its official attribution debut in this catalogue was not listed.
What Salon listing could have been more important than the Salon of 1882?
I eventually got around to the essays, and none of the contributors had mentioned either Portrait de M. L. A... or the Salon of 1882.
In Sir Lawrence's extensive biographical comments and catalogue notes for the portrait of the artist's father (pp. 9, 10, 15, 110), he didn't mention either the Salon of 1882 or Portrait de M. L. A..., which is not surprising since as recently as 1983 he had proclaimed the painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882 "Unidentifiable".
And yet there it was, listed for the first time ever, in fine print just below his catalogue notes.... what could have been more important to include in the catalogue notes than the story of that painting hanging in the Salon of 1882?
I mentioned my appreciation for Gowing's descriptive writing, and one of the most memorable passages in the book that truly made me pause and reflect was right on that very page.
The first time I opened the brand new book was devoted to the index, the chronology, and the catalogue notes and plates.
Since #21, the portrait of Louis-Auguste was one of the paintings I was already familiar with, and it was tucked between the portraits of Uncle Dominique which seemed related to my painting, I stopped to read Sir Lawrence's catalogue notes.
The following comments represent nearly half of Sir Lawrence's catalogue notes for the portrait of the artist's father:
"The banner heading of the newspaper is an integral part of the design of the picture. The thick and thin of the Bodoni-type lettering establishes the authority of reader and writer. In shape, the type descended from the capitals of Cezanne's first assertive signatures (see cat. 15) and it led the way to the emphatic verticals of the stencil lettering which announced the authority of Achille Emperaire (cat. 46) and placed his picture in the great portrait tradition. Otherwise there was a profound difference between the two works. The portrait of Louis-Auguste was the virtual invention of Impressionist intimism. The atmospheric notation of the pattern on the armchair and the counterpoint of angles in the pose were all at opposite extremes to the pattern and the form which were asserted and outlined for their own sake with an almost Byzantine rigidity in the portrayal of the afflicted cripple whom Cezanne admired."
I was reading, and looking back and forth at the painting trying to understand what he was saying, then I finally read the last paragraph and moved on to more of Uncle Dominique.
The exhibition list in small print, barely a paragraph below those comments, featured the debut of the attribution of Portrait de M. L. A..., and since the Salon of 1882 had not been mentioned in his catalogue notes or *anywhere else, I had no reason to notice the small print containing this apparently meaningless milestone in the artist's career that wasn't worth anyone mentioning.
*The only mention of the Salon of 1882 in Gowing 1988 was the note for the year 1882 in the Chronology (p. 216). Portrait de M. L. A... was not mentioned, nor was there any mention of a portrait of Louis-Auguste. And, if a portrait of the artist's father from 1866 had been exhibited in the Salon of 1882 as "Portrait de M.L.A...", why is "1895 Paris, Galerie Vollard, Paul Cezanne, Nov.-Dec." the first listing found under the heading "List of Exhibitions including Cezanne's Early Work"(p. 220)?
Following the debut exhibition listing of "Paris, Salon des Artistes français, 1882, no 502 ('Portrait de M.L.A....')" was "Paris, Orangerie, 1936, no. 3".
I looked-up the Paris 1936 listing under "Exhibitions" at the Online Catalogue Raisonné. The listing read: "1936c Paris Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, Cézanne, May 20–October 11, 1936. Exhibition catalogue". The 1936c listing showed that the same portrait of Louis-Auguste had been exhibited as "no. 3 Portrait du père de l'artiste, lent by M/M Lecomte; shown for the first time".
It is noteworthy to point out that according to the online catalogue, the first published reference listed for FWN 402 is Lawton 1911, which was also the first published image of FWN 402, and it was titled simply, "The Artist's Father".
Both Rewald and Gowing had commented on the Salon of 1882 over the years without mentioning Louis-Auguste, and both had commented on Louis-Auguste without mentioning the Salon of 1882, so it was a mystery as to how these detail oriented connoisseurs would have supported the listing of the Salon of 1882 as historical fact in the exhibition history for the portrait of Louis-Auguste, yet fail to mention it in their comments.
I can only conclude they had no idea the attribution had been added.
Over the years I had failed to notice that in Gowing 1988 the title had been changed to suggest Louis-Auguste's initials might be represented as "L. A.". I knew the story of the painting so I really didn't pay attention to the title. And since it had never entered any discussion of the Salon of 1882, over the years I never had reason to think about its exhibition list.
From all I had read in various biographies including Sir Lawrence's various biographical notes in his catalogue, the unsigned painting of the artist's father had never been submitted to the Salon, nor had I ever seen any indication that it had been exhibited during the painter's lifetime.
The question is, how could Sir Lawrence have missed, or been deprived of, the opportunity to eloquently describe this supposed Cezanne art historical breakthrough regarding a century-old mystery, apparently being revealed on his watch? We can only speculate that his job was to write the catalogue notes,...the titles, size, museum data, provenance, exhibition list and bibliography were someone else's task. As for the debut of the 1882 exhibition listing of Portrait de M.L.A...[sic], if he thought MLA was ‘unidentifiable,’ he had about as much reason to look at that portrait exhibition list as I did for 20 years. It was as though the attribution had been carried out as a matter of bookeeping which no one would ever notice, because after all, as it was presented, who would ever notice?
Highlighted in yellow is the debut exhibition listing which is otherwise not mentioned anywhere in the book. Highlighted in blue — and taking up more space in fine print than Sir Lawrence’s catalogue notes — are the fifty‑eight references listed in the bibliography. Among the dozens of obscure books and articles, I wondered how many might have linked this work to the Salon of 1882.
Yet in the chronology section of the same book (page 216), the entry for 1882 repeats the familiar comment:“Admitted to the Salon as ‘pupil’ of Guillemet; exhibits a portrait of a man (? a Self‑Portrait).”
This seemed at odds with what had been presented as historical fact at the top of the exhibition list for the portrait of Louis‑Auguste. Why doesn't it say;“exhibits the 1866 portrait of his father reading L’Événement”?
The 1882 chronology entry in Gowing 1988 was consistent with the comments of other writers I had found over the years who had published on Portrait de M. L. A…, including the speculation that it may have been a self‑portrait — a theory traceable to Georges Rivière (1933) and repeated by Gerstle Mack (1935).
This seems a good place to revisit André Leclerc’s (1914) comment that it had been “a small portrait.” The Fisherman measures 29½ × 23⅝ in. The portrait of Louis‑Auguste measures 78⅛ × 46 15⁄16 in.
Faced with the Louis‑Auguste theory — which could potentially bring an end to my research on Portrait de M. L. A… — I decided to check the National Gallery of Art’s website to see whether their exhibition history for The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Événement” (1866) also listed the Salon of 1882.
I found that neither Portrait de M. L. A… nor the Salon of 1882 were mentioned in the exhibition history, the general comments for the portrait of Louis‑Auguste, or the biographical essay on the artist.
Taken together, the silence in the catalogue notes, the contradictory chronology, the absence of any discussion in the essays, and the lack of corroboration in the National Gallery of Art’s own records made one thing unmistakably clear: the debut attribution of Portrait de M. L. A… to the Salon of 1882 existed only in the fine print of Gowing 1988. It appeared without explanation, without argument, and without acknowledgment from the very scholars whose work it contradicted. For more than a century the 1882 portrait had remained unidentified, and nothing in the historical record suggested that this mystery had been solved. Yet here, in a single line of small type, the attribution had quietly entered the canon.
I sent an email to the N.G.A. asking whether or not they supported the theory that their portrait of the artist’s father was the painting hung in the Salon of 1882, and if so, why neither Portrait de M. L. A… nor the Salon of 1882 appeared in their exhibition records for The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866.
What emerged from that exchange was not a firm institutional position but a glimpse into how the N.G.A. had inherited the attribution rather than established it. Their records reflected decades of accumulated assumption — an identification repeated often enough to seem settled, yet never grounded in contemporary evidence. The museum’s stance, as it became clear, was one of cautious acceptance rather than conviction.
An associate curator wrote back with the following response:
"I am responding to your query regarding the exhibition history of Paul Cézanne’s painting, The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" (1970.5.1). You inquired as to whether this was the painting Cézanne exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1882. There was a painting exhibited that year under the title “Portrait de M. L. A...” (no. 520) and based on the title alone, the National Gallery’s painting seems the most likely candidate. Unfortunately, due to a lack of supporting documentation, it is difficult to be 100% certain. There is no contemporary criticism or commentary that might have described the painting exhibited that year, nor any known reference to the exhibition in the correspondence of Cézanne or his circle (though there is always the possibility that such a document might one day appear). There are no markings or labels on the back of the painting to indicate it was exhibited at the Salon (the painting was relined long before it came to the National Gallery and I don’t believe that the original stretcher was retained, so any early labels or markings are now lost to us).
That said, the identification of The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement” as the painting shown in the 1882 Salon has been accepted by a number of scholars over the years, most notably John Rewald, the specialist who authored the catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s paintings published in 1996 (cat. no. 101). Barring compelling evidence to the contrary, I believe the identification of our painting as the work shown in the Salon is credible."
What a thoughtful and concise response!
While I wish I had asked a couple of follow‑up questions, I hadn’t mentioned why I was researching Portrait de M. L. A…, so I chose instead to work with what the curator had provided. The curator's reply immediately shifted the direction of my studies.
I now had confirmation that the N.G.A. possesses no documentation supporting the attribution. And I had been told that the portrait of Louis‑Auguste had been accepted as Portrait de M. L. A… by “a number of scholars over the years, most notably John Rewald,” whose 1996 catalogue raisonné remains the field’s central reference.
This comment was quite puzzling. Portrait de M. L. A… had been added to the exhibition list for the portrait of Louis‑Auguste for the first time in Sir Lawrence Gowing’s catalogue, yet neither Gowing nor any of the contributors — including John Rewald — mentioned it. I had read every book by Rewald I could locate, and I considered him the leading authority on Portrait de M. L. A…. How could I have missed his having accepted that it was the N.G.A. portrait of Louis‑Auguste?
And who were the "number of scholars over the years"? By 2012, after decades of searching, I hadn’t found a single scholar who had published speculation — much less acceptance — that Portrait de M. L. A… might have been a portrait of Louis‑Auguste. His name had simply never appeared in any commentary referring to the Salon of 1882.
The catalogue raisonné mentioned by the curator was published two years after Rewald’s death and eight years after the attribution first appeared in Gowing’s catalogue. By the time I became aware that the 1996 catalogue included the attribution, Rewald et al. was not available in any library in my area, nor is it available in digital form online. Purchasing a copy from a bookseller simply to see whether it contains any revised biographical information regarding the Salon of 1882 is an expense beyond my budget.
If the 1996 catalogue contained no new biographical information, I really wouldn’t have any use for it, because it has since been made obsolete by the online catalogue, which mentions only the same exhibition listing as Gowing 1988. Tracking it down in a university library remains on my to‑do list, but since the online catalogue contains no biographical information to substantiate the attribution, I don’t expect to see any explanation in Rewald et al. 1996.
Taken together, these inconsistencies forced me to reconsider the foundations of the attribution itself. If the N.G.A. had no documentation, if Rewald had never published a statement linking the 1882 Salon entry to the portrait of Louis‑Auguste, and if no other scholars had ever advanced the idea in print, then the identification could not have originated in evidence. It had to have entered the record some other way. The question was no longer who accepted the attribution, but how the attribution had come to exist at all.
It is not surprising that Sir Lawrence did not mention the Salon of 1882; it lay far beyond the scope of his catalogue. But the portrait of Louis‑Auguste was very much within that scope. If Gowing had been aware that his own exhibition list effectively solved the century‑old mystery of Portrait de M. L. A…, he would almost certainly have noted both the biographical milestone and its relevance to the history of the portrait of Louis‑Auguste — especially since he discussed the painting at length, including references to Guillemet’s letter to Zola of November 2, 1866.
Not long after my inquiry, the N.G.A. updated the exhibition history of The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" (1866) to read:
"1882 - Probably Salon of 1882 "Portrait de M.L.A...."
(These were the same modified initials without spaces that appeared in Gowing 1988. Their presence there does not indicate that Gowing himself was aware of the attribution; Gowing 1988 did not use the word “Probably.”)
While there is no documentation connecting Portrait de M. L. A… with the portrait of Louis‑Auguste, the N.G.A. website lists Ambroise Vollard as the first owner of The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Evénement”. Yet when I returned to Vollard’s own comments on Portrait de M. L. A…, his position could not have been clearer:
"In spite of every endeavor, I have been absolutely unable to discover either the full name of the model who posed for this picture, or just which canvas the name is supposed to refer to."
It seems evident that neither Vollard nor anyone he consulted had ever considered The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Evénement” (1866) — a painting he himself had owned — to be a plausible candidate for Portrait de M. L. A….
The curator’s response at the N.G.A. nevertheless gave me several solid leads for investigating the official attribution. Although there was no mention of the description in the Dictionnaire Véron, the reply did include the statement: “based on the title alone, the National Gallery’s painting seems the most likely candidate.” I assumed this referred to the modified titles in Gowing 1988 and Rewald et al. 1996, since the N.G.A. has never included the name Louis‑Auguste in the title of its portrait of the artist’s father.
The Gowing catalogue, where the official attribution first appeared, had retitled the painting Portrait of Louis‑Auguste Cézanne, Father of the Artist, Reading “L’Evénement.” Then, without explanation, and apparently on the basis of simply adding Louis‑Auguste’s name to the title, the exhibition listing “Paris, Salon des Artistes Français, 1882, no. 502 (‘Portrait de M.L.A….’)” was introduced.
The editor who rearranged the initials was almost correct in suggesting that they represented “Monsieur Louis‑Auguste,” but overlooked the necessary space after the abbreviation for Monsieur — i.e., Portrait de M. L.A… — which would have been one of the proper ways to abbreviate “Monsieur Louis‑Auguste.” However, as far as I can tell from my study of the Salon catalogues, it is always the surname initial that precedes the points of suspension, not a hyphenated forename.
Moreover, writing “M.” without a space negates its function as the title Monsieur. The three unspaced initials “M.L.A…” therefore describe a triple‑barreled surname — for example, Marston‑Louden‑Andrews — which would be incorrect, because a title initial would also be required: Portrait de M. M.L.A….
Adding a space after M. to produce “M. L.A…” would also be incorrect, because it misrepresents the published Salon title, which was Portrait de M. L. A… — a format that describes the title initial “M.” for Monsieur, followed by a single forename initial “L.” and a single surname initial “A…”.
The online catalogue now lists the title correctly as Portrait de M. L. A…, which could conceivably be read as “Monsieur Louis Auguste…,” with “Auguste” functioning as the surname.
But the artist’s father’s name is Louis‑Auguste, and if any portrait of him had ever been submitted to the Salon, it would certainly have been titled Portrait de Monsieur Louis‑Auguste Cézanne. The correct abbreviated forms would have been:
M. L.-A. C…, M. L.A. C…, or M. LA C….
The anonymous editor of Gowing 1988 may have been in a position to rename the title of the painting of Louis‑Auguste, but they cannot also retroactively retitle the published Salon listing Portrait de M. L. A… by rearranging the initials to suit their narrative.
I believe there had to be reasons why no writer had ever suggested that the very obvious “L” and “A” in the title might refer to Louis‑Auguste. Beyond the typographical problems the initials present, the idea also makes no sense biographically..
Although the N.G.A. recognizes the official attribution, the exhibition listing appears with the qualifier “Probably,” and the museum has never incorporated the story of the 1882 Salon into the biographical essay for the painting. That omission suggests a lack of confidence in the attribution itself.
Logically, if the portrait of Louis‑Auguste had truly been Cézanne’s only painting ever accepted into the Salon — and if that identification were substantiated — it would have to be a major highlight of the biographical notes for the painting.
This was a period in my life when my Portrait de M. L. A… studies were placed on the back burner, largely because I was uncertain how to proceed after my interaction with the N.G.A. curator. I knew I would have to locate the source of any Louis‑Auguste narrative that predated the unexplained official attribution in Gowing 1988, but I simply did not have the time to travel to libraries in search of it.
Meanwhile, my studies in support of The Fisherman continued at full speed as I refined my theories and presentations, including the development of a video technique that allowed viewers to examine the painting under magnification at the level of individual brushstrokes.
The unanswered questions surrounding Portrait de M. L. A… would have to wait, but they never stopped waiting for me.
In early 2014, I came across an article announcing the upcoming Cézanne Online Catalogue Raisonné, which included an email contact for researchers seeking early access. The contact was David Nash, one of the project’s co‑directors.
This seemed like an opportunity to jump‑start my Portrait de M. L. A… studies. I began copying and pasting my compiled notes — decades of published comments, citations, and observations — into an email to present as my bona fides, along with my request for early access.
I explained that the aim of my research was to understand how, after more than a century of silence, it had been determined that The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Evénement” (1866) was the Portrait de M. L. A… exhibited in the Salon of 1882. I also mentioned my belief that I had discovered the lost portrait, though at that time I did not include photographs or links to my research pages.
My email was forwarded by Nash to his co‑director, Jayne Warman, who replied by denying my request for early access.
Her official response to my inquiry was:
“The Portrait of Cézanne’s father in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was indeed shown in the 1882 Salon. In fact, it was the ONLY painting of Cézanne’s that was accepted into the Salon. The large painting was found rolled up in Cézanne’s studio after the painter died.”
"In fact"?
While Portrait de M. L. A… was indeed the only painting Cézanne ever had accepted into the Salon, there are no apparent facts to suggest that The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Evénement” (1866) was the painting exhibited in 1882. If such facts existed, why did co‑director Warman not simply provide them?
I had asked David Nash for early access in order to research precisely this question: how, after more than a century of silence, it had been determined that Portrait de M. L. A… was a portrait of Louis‑Auguste. The sitter’s name had never appeared in any commentary on the Salon of 1882. Surely there must have been an explanation.
I had not expected the published comments by historians and biographers that I had included with my inquiry to be ignored, and I was astonished that Jayne Warman — co‑director of the online catalogue — considered “was indeed” a sufficient explanation of how the attribution had come about.
She concluded by inviting me to send information and photographs of my painting. That invitation made me uneasy; it did not feel like the right moment to press her to substantiate her response. Later, as I sent Ms. Warman the links to the study page for my painting, it occurred to me that she might well have been the anonymous associate of Sir Lawrence who had introduced the attribution in the first place. And there I was, sending her material in which I was not only proposing the painting to be by Cézanne, but suggesting it might be Portrait de M. L. A… as well.
Her brief reply did, however, contain something new — a detail I had never encountered before — along with her own description of the painting’s size:
"The large painting was found rolled up in Cézanne's studio after the painter died".
The only historical comments ever made about the size of Portrait de M. L. A… were André Leclerc’s 1914 remark that it was “a small portrait,” Rivière’s description of it as “a small canvas” (1933), and his earlier comment that “no one noticed the portrait, certainly small in size” (1923). And the Tête d’homme mentioned by Venturi (FWN 392) measured only 18 1/8 × 14 5/8 inches.
Warman’s new information was her assertion that the portrait of Louis‑Auguste had been found rolled up in Cézanne’s studio after the artist’s death. This seemed to align with what the N.G.A. curator had written about the museum never having received the original stretcher. Although I could not see how this detail explained the attribution in any way, I mentally filed it away as something that might prove meaningful.
To be clear, just as Warman had denied my request for early access without addressing any of the research I had provided, she later rejected my attribution of The Fisherman without commenting on the detailed analysis and photographs I had sent.
My initial inquiry — asking who had made the attribution — had been forwarded to her, and if she had been the one responsible, it seems she might have said so and recused herself from judging my painting. Had her refusal to clarify the attribution in Gowing 1988 afforded her the anonymity to stand in judgment of the painting I believed to be Portrait de M. L. A…?
If there had been any transparency surrounding the sudden and unsubstantiated attribution of such a major milestone in Cézanne’s career, I would never have needed to ask. I was fairly certain it had not been Sir Lawrence Gowing, and I had not yet discovered how John Rewald was involved, but it was only a matter of time.
Before I go any further on the subject of Jayne Warman, I want to be clear: apart from our differences of opinion on Portrait de M. L. A… and The Fisherman, I hold her and her colleagues in the highest esteem for the miracle of technology they have created with the Cézanne Online Catalogue Raisonné.
What a world we live in. Whatever thoughts I have about the artist’s paintings, drawings, and watercolors can be explored within moments through the online catalogue. Truly, those responsible for bringing this modern wonder to fruition are innovative geniuses.
Literally any portrait, landscape, still life, or figure composition is available instantly, along with provenance, exhibitions, published references, and high‑resolution color images. To browse the entire catalogue of drawings and sketchbooks in an afternoon is astonishing. It allows a researcher to broaden their knowledge in ways that were previously impossible. I often wander the catalogue for hours without noticing the passage of time.
Another modern technological advance is having digitized versions of nearly all the reference books in my research library, as well as many rare volumes I do not own physically. To have them all available from my desktop is unimaginable, and I regularly rely on them to develop new theories and verify details. The ability to magnify the text of a PDF is far more convenient than wielding a magnifying glass over a printed page, and the search function is a revelation.
Yet even with all these modern tools at my fingertips, the origins of the attribution remained stubbornly opaque. The Online Catalogue had preserved the mystery, not solved it. If anything, its silence made the earlier sources more important than ever. To understand how the attribution had taken root, I would have to return to the one document that predated all modern speculation — the only contemporary description of a portrait of Louis‑Auguste ever recorded.
And that meant going back to November 2, 1866, to the letter Antoine Guillemet wrote to Émile Zola — the letter whose description of a “blonde” portrait of Cézanne’s father had been misdated, misattributed, and misunderstood for more than a century. Before I could untangle the modern attribution, I needed to understand the painting that actually was seen in 1866.
Because of its late‑20th‑century attribution as the portrait exhibited in the Salon of 1882, The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Événement” (1866) is a painting to which I have devoted considerable study — a painting I regard as a pivotal work of 1860s Cézanne, irrespective of the later attribution. With the online catalogue now making it possible to view Cézanne’s portraits as a coherent group, it becomes clear that this canvas was an extraordinary, one‑of‑a‑kind work for its era.
Recently, Jayne Warman’s comment about the “large rolled‑up canvas” resurfaced in my mind, and I realized that—aside from Antoine Guillemet’s letter to Zola describing a portrait of Louis‑Auguste reading his newspaper—the historical trail of that painting effectively ends on 2 November 1866. It does not reappear until the day it was unrolled in Cézanne’s studio after his death in 1906. This forty‑year silence is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the painting was exhibited in 1882 or known to Cézanne’s circle during his lifetime.
Unless Cézanne intended to cut up the canvas and reuse it, rolling it up made perfect sense as a way to keep it out of his father’s sight. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that he was also protecting the painting from himself — preserving a work whose meaning may have been too personal, too fraught, or too revealing to remain visible in his studio. Such an act of concealment helps explain why the painting left no trace in the documentary record of Cézanne’s lifetime.
But wait!
Assuming it is the same canvas, the painting found rolled up after the artist's death was not the painting described by Guillemet!
Let's look at Antoine Guillemet's letter to Zola, which is transcribed at the Societe Paul Cezanne website in Alain Mothe's chronological timeline listing for November 2 1866.
Guillemet’s Letter to Zola (2 November 1866) French text after Baligand 1978 and Rewald 1978, as reproduced by the Société Paul Cézanne:
Mon cher Zola,
Depuis un grand mois me voici à Aix, cette Athènes du Midi, et le temps ne m’y a pas semblé long, je vous assure. Du beau temps, un beau pays, des coteries avec qui causer peinture et bâtir quelques théories que l’on démolit le lendemain ; tout cela a fait pour moi d’Aix un séjour agréable. Paul, dans ses deux lettres, vous a plutôt parlé de moi que de lui, je ferai la même chose, c’est‑à‑dire le contraire, et vais vous parler beaucoup du maître. Son physique est plutôt embelli, ses cheveux sont longs, sa figure respire la santé et sa tenue elle‑même fait sensation sur le cours. Vous voilà donc tranquille sur ce côté. Son moral, quoique toujours en ébullition, lui laisse des embellies, et la peinture, encouragée par quelques commandes sérieuses, promet de le récompenser de ses efforts, en un mot, le « ciel de l’avenir semble par moments moins noir ». Vous verrez à son retour à Paris quelques tableaux qui vous plairont fort ; entr’autres une Ouverture de Tannhäuser qui pourrait être dédiée à Robert, car il s’y trouve un piano réussi ; puis un portrait de son père dans un grand fauteuil qui a bien bon air. La peinture en est blonde et l’allure très belle, le père a l’air d’un pape sur son trône, n’était le Siècle qu’il lit. En un mot, cela va, et d’ici peu nous verrons de fort belles choses, soyez‑en sûr.
(remaining paragraphs omitted here, as they do not concern the portrait) English Translation (by the author) Translated with attention to Guillemet’s painterly vocabulary, idiom, and tone, calibrated against his letter to Oller of 12 September 1866.
My dear Zola,
For more than a month now I’ve been here in Aix, this Athens of the South, and time has not seemed long to me, I assure you. Good weather, a beautiful countryside, little circles of friends with whom to talk painting and build a few theories that we demolish the next day — all this has made Aix a pleasant stay for me.
Paul, in his two letters, spoke more about me than about himself; I will do the same — that is to say, the opposite — and tell you a great deal about the master. His appearance has actually improved; his hair is long, his face radiates health, and even his manner of dress causes a sensation on the Cours. So you may rest easy on that score.
His spirits, though always in a state of boiling agitation, give him moments of brightness, and painting, encouraged by some serious commissions, promises to reward his efforts; in short, the “sky of the future seems at times less dark.”
You will see, upon his return to Paris, some paintings that will please you greatly; among them an Overture to Tannhäuser that could be dedicated to Robert, for it contains a successfully rendered piano; and then a portrait of his father in a large armchair, which has a very fine presence. The painting is blonde in tonality, and the overall bearing is very beautiful; the father looks like a pope on his throne, were it not for Le Siècle he is reading.
In short, things are going well, and before long we shall see some very beautiful things, you may be sure of that.
---
Translator’s Note:
This translation is based on the French text published in Baligand (1978) and Rewald (1978), as reproduced by the Société Paul Cézanne. It is rendered with attention to Guillemet’s painterly vocabulary and 19th‑century idiom. Terms such as blonde (a technical term for light tonality), bon air (dignified bearing), and allure (overall bearing or presence) are preserved in their painterly sense. The phrase “n’était le Siècle qu’il lit” is unambiguous in French and clearly identifies the newspaper as Le Siècle; the bracketed “[L’Événement]” sometimes seen in modern transcriptions is an editorial insertion and not part of the original letter.
Guillemet’s tone, humor, and vocabulary in this letter are consistent with his earlier letter to Francisco Oller (12 September 1866), which provides a reliable stylistic control sample for his rhetorical habits, painterly slang, and characteristic exaggeration.
--
In his timeline, following the transcriptions of the letters by Guillemet and Cézanne, Mothe notes:
"The portrait of Cézanne's father mentioned in Guillemet, a "blonde" painting, seems to be Louis-Auguste Cezanne, the artist's father, reading L'Événement (FWN402-R101), and not Le Siècle, contrary to what Guillemet writes. Cézanne could not have brought with him to Paris, since it is painted directly on a wall, but Guillemet may not have noticed.
One might assume that Cézanne first painted Le Siècle as the title of the newspaper, and that he later substituted L'Événement, as a tribute to Zola and his series of articles in that journal, but this assumption has not been confirmed by a scientific analysis of the painting. It is therefore likely that Guillemet made a mistake in the title of the newspaper.
Hours Madeleine: "Cezanne's Portrait of His Father," Studies in the History of Art, Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1971, 1972, pp. 63-76"
Mothe's notes reminded me of Jayne Warman's response ignoring all historical comments on Portrait de M. L. A... and the Salon of 1882. After he quotes the online catalogue and Rewald et al 1996 (FWN402-R101), he goes on to say: "Cézanne could not have brought with him to Paris, since it is painted directly on a wall, but Guillemet may not have noticed."
The portrait of Louis-Auguste reading which was painted on the wall between the paintings of the Four Seasons at the Jas de Bouffon was FWN398-R95 Portrait de Louis-Auguste Cezanne, père de l'artiste c.1865, and that portrait of Louis-Auguste does not show the masthead of the newspaper.
His assumption that Guillemet, the first-hand eye witness describing what he saw, had been mistaken when he described it as "Le Siècle" seems baseless, as it would be hard to mistake the two mastheads which are as different as apples and oranges.
Alain Mothe's chronology was a grand undertaking, but his comments here seem ill-informed, not unlike the attribution of Portrait de M. L. A... to this very painting.
We can look at the masthead now and understand what it had been when it was described by Guillemet (Le Siècle), and what had been changed from that description (L'Evénement).
It seems unlikely that Guillemet had mistakenly written "Le Siècle" in his letter, and in light of Zola's articles, if the masthead had been L'Evénement, that would have been the topic of the letter.
Perhaps the most substantial and coherent discussion of The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 appeared in John Rewald's article, Cézanne and His Father, published in Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 4 (1971-1972), pp. 38-62, by The National Gallery of Art. Rewald’s study preceded the technical article by Madeleine Hours to which Mothe refers, and it remains the earliest sustained attempt to interpret the painting’s altered masthead within the biographical and historical context of Cézanne’s early career.
Addressing the change from Le Siècle to L’Événement, Rewald wrote:
"“Since it is quite obvious that the banker was actually reading Le Siècle while sitting for his son, the change of the paper’s masthead came as an afterthought and obliged the artist to redo only a small section of his work.
It seems impossible not to recognize here Cézanne’s intention to make the painting more meaningful and relevant without altering his artistic concept. Only his most intimate friends could have known that L’Événement did not relate merely to a short-lived newspaper, but those few must have realized that the painter was establishing a link between the man who provided for him (and was to do so for the rest of his life) and the friend who had exerted the most important single influence on his adolescence and early years as an artist.
Since Louis-Auguste Cézanne was not particularly fond of Zola, precisely on account of this influence, he may have resented this ‘falsification’ of his likeness, this introduction of an element that was patently foreign to him. But by now he had resigned himself to the situation and probably did not even care.”
Rewald's comment about the artist's "intimate friends" was interesting. As far as I am aware, the finished painting featuring L'Evénement was never mentioned by anyone during the artist's lifetime. The fact that it had not been mentioned doesn't prove that it was not seen by his "intimate friends", nor does Rewald's speculation prove that anyone had seen it.
Historically, these were the glory days of the Batignolles group meetings at the Café Guerbois, so logically, if it had been known among his artist friends (who had been the focus of Zola's articles) that Cézanne had painted a portrait of his father reading L'Evénement, his artist friends would have applauded him, and history would have recorded their approval. In fact, while many of his artist friends have written accounts of Cézanne's legendary appearances at the Café Guerbois, no mention of the portrait of his father has been documented.
Gowing’s biographical essay for The Early Years contains a revealing contradiction. On page 10 he writes:
"The picture of the father described by Guillemet on 2 November 1866 is a demonstration piece. Louis-Auguste is reading the paper, "L'Evénement", which had printed Zola's series of articles on the Salon..."
Yet only a few lines later he reverses himself:
"In fact Louis-Auguste did not read "L'Evénement". Guillemet describes him reading Le Siècle, a conservative paper which had always attacked Manet as vigorously as Zola defended him."
Thus, despite Gowing’s initial attempt to align the painting with Zola’s articles, both he and Rewald ultimately acknowledge the same primary‑source fact:
the newspaper Guillemet described on 2 November 1866 was Le Siècle, not L’Événement.
The painting discovered rolled up in Cézanne’s studio would indeed qualify as a “demonstration piece” — if we had evidence that anyone had seen it during the artist’s lifetime. But the history of the painting now known as The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Événement” (1866) can only begin at the moment it first enters the historical record. No such record exists before its posthumous discovery.
I have yet to learn when Guillemet's letter to Zola, dated November 2, 1866 was discovered. Is the painting, with either masthead, mentioned anywhere else prior to its discovery following the artist's death?
When Vollard purchased it, it was recorded in his stockbook as "Grand portrait d'homme" purchased on February 12, 1907. So at the time, Vollard may not have even known it was a portrait of Louis-Auguste.
The online catalogue's list of published references to The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 is extensive, but in most cases, the items on the list are so difficult to locate that they are frustrating smoke and mirror references to nothing but the fact that a photo of the painting was included. The references never seem to relate to biographical or historical information regarding the painting (or the Salon of 1882) included in the same book.
However, the published references do provide helpful insight into the evolving titles. The first published image and reference to the portrait in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. known as The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 listed at both the online catalogue and Gowing 1988 is Fredrick Lawton "Paul Cézanne." Art Journal, no. 2 (February 1911), p. 60, ill.
What is not referenced is Lawton's comments on the Salon of 1882 on p. 57, and his comments on the artist's paintings collected by Auguste Pellerin (p. 58), where Lawton described the portrait of Louis-Auguste: "a full-length sitting figure of his father, forcefully rendered with tints of porcelain brilliancy". The portrait, reproduced on p. 60 in a photo by Paris photographer Jacques-Ernest Bulloz, was listed simply as "The Artist's Father".
The next published reference appeared in Charles Louis Borgmeyer’s The Master Impressionists (Chicago: The Fine Arts Press, 1913), p. 271, where the portrait was reproduced as Portrait of the artist’s father, Collection Pellerin. Borgmeyer’s discussion of the Salon of 1882, on p. 134, makes no mention of the portrait of Louis‑Auguste.
Several of the more elusive early listings are equally uninformative. A 1913 New York Times article on a private collection in Darmstadt refers to the work simply as The Newspaper Reader. Coquiot (1919) lists it as Portrait de son père; Gasquet (1921) as Le père de Cézanne dans le fauteuil. None of these authors comments on the masthead, the newspaper, or any biographical or historical context.
The first reference to reproduce the painting under a German title appears in Julius Meier‑Graefe’s Cézanne und sein Kreis (Munich: R. Piper, 1922), ill. p. 88, as Der Leser (Bildnis des Vaters), 1866.
This early reproduction corresponds to the photograph preserved in the Vollard archives, showing the portrait before restoration and relining. It is the earliest visual record of the painting’s posthumous condition.
The actual caption in Meier‑Graefe’s 1922 volume reads: “Der Leser, gegen 1865. Sammlung A. Pellerin, Paris. Photo A. Vollard.” It is striking to compare this early photograph from the Vollard archives with later reproductions, as it appears to show the painting before restoration and relining — the horizontal cracks likely caused by the canvas having been rolled, possibly since 1866. Vollard purchased the work in 1907, and by the time it was photographed by Jacques‑Ernest Bulloz and published for the first time in Lawton’s 1911 article, the canvas had already been relined and repaired.
According to Guillemet’s letter, the canvas itself dates to 2 November 1866, which raises the central question: when did Cézanne alter the masthead from Le Siècle to L’Événement?
Madeleine Hours, former head of the Louvre Laboratory, published her technical study “Cézanne’s Portrait of His Father” in Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 4 (1971–72), pp. 63–76.
Her article summarizes the 1970 examination of the painting by the Research Laboratory of the Museums of France, conducted “under diverse visible and invisible radiation.” The analysis included ultraviolet, infrared, and X‑ray photography, as well as images taken in tangential light.
Significantly, Hours reports no trace whatsoever of an earlier masthead beneath the present one. If the original Le Siècle masthead had remained in any detectable form, the laboratory would have recorded it. The absence of such evidence strongly suggests that Cézanne scraped away the original masthead while the paint was still fresh — very likely shortly after Guillemet saw the painting on 2 November 1866.
The modification to L’Événement was therefore almost certainly made in late 1866. It may even have been prompted by Guillemet himself after writing to Zola, or simply by Cézanne’s recognition that the masthead of L’Événement fit the painted newspaper more naturally. As the masthead comparison above shows, a Le Siècle masthead painted to scale would have been barely legible.
Whatever the immediate reason, the change transformed the painting. Rather than functioning as a “demonstration piece,” the portrait may instead have become a private tribute — a quiet acknowledgment of Zola’s efforts on behalf of their painter friends, and a personal memento Cézanne never intended to share publicly. If the painting had been meant as a public gesture, he could easily have presented it to Zola, thereby honoring him and avoiding the risk of his father ever seeing it.
This also explains why the painting was rolled up and forgotten, rather than displayed or given away. And it underscores the improbability that Cézanne would have submitted it to the Salon of 1882. Only in that hypothetical scenario — had he chosen to exhibit it — would the portrait have become a true “demonstration piece.”
However, history tells us that Antoine Guillemet took advantage of the teacher–student provision only after Cézanne’s submission had been rejected twice by the jury. It is one thing to imagine the jury taking the high ground and allowing Guillemet to bring in a twice‑rejected canvas by Cézanne under this rule. But given Cézanne’s long and contentious history with the Salon, it is quite another to believe that the jury would have permitted Guillemet to smuggle in a “demonstration piece” featuring a figure reading L’Événement — the very newspaper in which Zola had attacked the Salon jury for its treatment of Manet and the Impressionists.
If Cézanne had submitted such a painting in 1882, the jury would have recognized the provocation immediately. It is difficult to imagine that they would have allowed Guillemet to assist Cézanne in carrying out such a pointed act of defiance.
Moreover, considering Guillemet’s kindness in making it possible for Cézanne to realize his long‑held dream of exhibiting at the Salon, it seems unlikely that Cézanne would have thanked him by reminding the jury of Zola’s inflammatory articles in L’Événement. Had he done so, the incident would not have passed quietly. It would have become infamous — remembered as Cézanne’s most audacious challenge to the Salon establishment.
Having compiled the most complete list of published comments on the painting titled “Portrait de M. L. A…”, exhibited by Paul Cézanne in the Salon of 1882, I have found no historical record to suggest any controversy, demonstration, or act of defiance associated with that submission. This absence alone makes it highly unlikely that the painting shown in 1882 was The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Événement” (1866).
The subject matter further undermines the possibility. In 1882, Cézanne was still navigating the financial and emotional fallout from his father’s discovery of Hortense and Paul Jr. It is difficult to imagine that he would have chosen this moment to present a sixteen‑year‑old portrait of Louis‑Auguste reading L’Événement — the very newspaper in which Zola had attacked the Salon jury and championed the Impressionists. If such a painting had been unrolled and seen at any point during the intervening forty years, it would almost certainly have been mentioned, and it would have been eagerly acquired by a perceptive collector or by one of the artists Zola had defended. Instead, the painting remained rolled up and unknown until after Cézanne’s death.
In my view, this silence speaks volumes. A painting that truly functioned as the “demonstration piece” described by Gowing — a portrait of the artist’s father reading Zola’s newspaper — would not have vanished without a trace. It would have been remembered, discussed, and celebrated as Cézanne’s boldest act of defiance. The fact that no such record exists strongly suggests that the 1882 Salon painting was not the portrait now known as The Artist’s Father Reading “L’Événement”.
What history and Guillemet’s letter to Zola tell us is that the portrait described as The Artist’s Father Reading “Le Siècle” was last seen on 2 November 1866, and that the painting later recorded as “Grand portrait d’homme” was found rolled up in Cézanne’s studio after his death in 1906 and purchased by Vollard in 1907. I believe without hesitation that FWN 402 is the finished version of the painting Guillemet described to Zola. But I have found no historical or biographical evidence to suggest that it was ever submitted to the Salon — neither in the 1860s nor in 1882.
Only a handful of Cézanne’s works from the 1860s were intended for public exhibition at the Paris Salon. The unsigned portrait of his father reading L’Événement was almost certainly not among them. Had it been, the submission would have generated a well‑documented controversy. A portrait of Louis‑Auguste reading Zola’s newspaper — the very paper in which Zola attacked the Salon jury — would not have passed unnoticed.
Many of Cézanne’s pictorial puzzles of the 1870s seem to have been created for a very limited audience of close friends, challenging them to interpret scenes that often alluded to current events. In the case of the finished 1866 portrait of his father, however, the intended audience may have been Cézanne alone. The painting’s silence in the historical record, its absence from the recollections of the Batignolles circle, and its discovery rolled up after the artist’s death all point to a work that was never meant for public display.
If the portrait had been unrolled and seen at any time during the forty years that followed its creation, it would almost certainly have been mentioned — and it would have been eagerly acquired by a perceptive collector or by one of the artists Zola had defended. Instead, it remained hidden, a private object whose meaning was known only to the painter.
Taken together, the documentary record, the silence of Cézanne’s contemporaries, and the physical history of the canvas all point to the same conclusion: the portrait described by Guillemet in 1866 and the painting later found rolled up in Cézanne’s studio are one and the same, yet the work never entered the public sphere during the artist’s lifetime. Its absence from Salon records, from the recollections of the Batignolles circle, and from the early biographies suggests that the painting’s meaning was private, not demonstrative. Far from being a public challenge to the Salon or a coded tribute intended for Zola and their circle, the portrait appears to have remained a personal object— a work Cézanne completed, altered, and then quietly set aside. Only after his death did it emerge into history, carrying with it the traces of a moment witnessed by Guillemet but never shared with the world. In this sense, the painting’s long silence is not an omission but a clue, revealing the deeply personal nature of a work that was never meant to speak beyond the artist himself.
Having grown up in the antique import business, I have always identified with Cézanne’s frugal Provençal nature — nothing was ever thrown away. So if Cézanne rolled up the portrait of his father to keep it out of sight, isn’t it likely that he reused the same stretcher for another painting? With that question in mind, I turned to the online catalogue to verify the size of the portrait of Louis‑Auguste (78 1/8 × 46 15/16 in.), intending to compare it with the dimensions of subsequent portraits. Most were considerably smaller.
After checking the next twenty portraits — including his striking self‑portrait of 1866, the entire Uncle Dominique series, and the powerful Negro Scipion — I came upon Portrait du peintre Achille Emperaire (1867–68), the large, imposing canvas Cézanne submitted to the Salon of 1870.
In effect, Cézanne had transformed the painting described by Guillemet into a private parody of his father — a tongue‑in‑cheek “jackalope” of sorts — which, as far as we know, was never seen or mentioned during his lifetime. Once completed, he rolled it up and set it aside. But the stretcher, a valuable commodity for a young painter with limited means, did not go to waste. He repurposed it for his grandiose submission to the Salon of 1870: the monumental Portrait du peintre Achille Emperaire.
Delivered dramatically on the final day of submissions, the Emperaire portrait was everything the hidden 1866 canvas was not — public, confrontational, and impossible to ignore. It was a painting everyone would see, and everyone did. The contrast between the two works could not be sharper: one rolled up in secrecy, the other thrust into the center of the Paris art world.
We are fortunate that Cézanne reused only the stretcher and not the canvas itself.
In the end, the simplest explanation often proves the most revealing. The portrait Guillemet saw in 1866 vanished not through mystery or malice, but through Cézanne’s own practical habits — rolled up, set aside, and its stretcher pressed back into service for a far more public ambition. What remained hidden for decades was not a lost masterpiece, but the quiet logic of an artist who saved everything, reused what he could, and kept certain works entirely to himself. The rediscovery of the rolled canvas after Cézanne’s death was not the unveiling of a forgotten Salon submission, but the reappearance of a private object that had never entered the world he so often resisted. In this sense, the painting was never truly lost; it was simply waiting for us to understand the path it had taken.
It was late 2014 that I began circling back to the many books I had found in libraries over the years in a search for justification of the N.G.A. curator's comment that "the identification of The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement” as the painting shown in the 1882 Salon has been accepted by a number of scholars over the years, most notably John Rewald."
I eventually located an online .pdf of a later biography by John Rewald (Cézanne; A Biography - Harry N. Abrams - New York, 1986), just one of many books I had brought home from one of the many libraries I had visited over the years. I recalled only finding the book once at a library in another county. I remember being intrigued by the slip-cover art which featured a ceramic jug with what I perceived as circular reflections.
This larger format coffee-table version was Rewald's final biography of Cézanne, and it pre-dated Gowing 1988 by two years.
When I first discovered the 1986 biography, the many large historical photos and color plates were like treasure, and I was initially dazzled by the shiny new objects. Although I spot-checked various sections of the text against earlier versions, I found few changes, and I just didn’t have the time to read it cover to cover in search of revisions. Such is the life of an amateur art researcher with a day job and a family.
This book listed "Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne Reading L’Evénement (The Artist’s Father)" among the portraits in its index, and among the amended text I finally found what appears to be the first comments in one of John Rewald's books mentioning the portrait of Louis-Auguste in relation to Portrait de M. L. A....
The question is whether John Rewald had made the revisions, or someone else had done so in the editing room just as the exhibition listing had been added to the portrait of Louis-Auguste without mention in Gowing 1988.
The 1986 biography text regarding Portrait de M. L. A... was essentially the same text from 1948 but included the ammendments highlighted below:
"In 1879 Antoine Guillemet had done his best to have a painting by Cézanne accepted, but “alas, without bringing any change in the attitude of those hard-hearted judges.”
"Guillemet had left far behind the days in which his bloodthirsty enthusiasm had been eager to wield the dagger of insurrection and to dance on the belly of the terrified bourgeois. By now a comfortable bourgeois himself, he had—through the consistent insignificance of his landscapes—even achieved a certain official status by becoming a member of the Salon jury. But at least he had not forgotten his comrade of earlier battles."
"It was finally in 1882 that he managed to have a canvas of Cézanne’s “accepted” by using the prerogative of jury members to exhibit the work of one of their students. Cézanne, who sent in a Portrait of Monsieur L. A., thus is listed in the catalogue as “pupil of Antoine Guillemet.”
"It is not known which work Cezanne selected; some say it was a self-portrait (which seems unlikely). The initials L.A. could have stood for those of the artist's father, Louis-Auguste, although it appears doubtful that Cezanne would have picked such an early work, except that it was a painting Guillemet had once greatly admired."
In any case, Cézanne’s portrait did not attract public attention, though a critic, taking the “pupil of Antoine Guillemet” for a novice, wrote: “Monsieur L. A. is painted with wide brushstrokes. The shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek as well as the quality of the light tones presage a future colorist.”
"The words could very well have been prompted by Cézanne’s Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne Reading L’Evénement."
"However, the prerogative that had opened the back door of the Salon to Cézanne was remanded that same year, and Guillemet thus was no longer able to use his position on his friend’s behalf."
The 1986 revisions to the standard Portrait de M. L. A... comments published in Rewald's biographies since 1948 are even more ambiguous than the unexplained exhibition listing in Gowing 1988. The only thing we can be sure of is the original text, the revisions clearly seem to be written by someone else. I had mentioned earlier that I liked Rewald's style of writing because it was straight forward and based on history and biographical information.
In this case someone has hijacked the familiar subject to create a narrative, staging this back-and-forth conversation of implausible theories, which if discussed with the same transparency as the self-portrait theory everyone knew was from Rivière would have been fine, then we would know with whom Rewald was disagreeing. Had it not been for the subsequent attribution in Gowing 1988, the implausible Portrait de M. L. A... narrative coat-tailed into Rewald 1986 may have gone unnoticed:
(Rewald) "In 1879 Antoine Guillemet had done his best to have a painting by Cézanne accepted, but “alas, without bringing any change in the attitude of those hard-hearted judges.”
(Edit-1) " Guillemet had left far behind the days in which his bloodthirsty enthusiasm had been eager to wield the dagger of insurrection and to dance on the belly of the terrified bourgeois. By now a comfortable bourgeois himself, he had—through the consistent insignificance of his landscapes—even achieved a certain official status by becoming a member of the Salon jury. But at least he had not forgotten his comrade of earlier battles."
**This passage is written in a way that makes it appear Rewald is describing Guillemet's character and talent, when in fact the comments are drawn from, and then improvised upon from a September 1866 letter from Guillemet to Francisco Oller on p.64 of the same book. A more accurate assessment of Guillemet by Rewald can be found on p.45:
"Among Cézanne’s Parisian friends who remained close to Zola as well were Camille Pissarro and Antoine Guillemet. Both Cézanne and Zola seem to have felt a real affection for Pissarro; as to Guillemet, particularly lively and gay, full of amusing ideas and ever good-natured, his company was always appreciated. Cézanne liked him so much that he even accepted his occasional gibes without ill feeling. Guillemet is credited with having supplied many a canvas by Cézanne with more or less fancy titles. Thus he christened one of his paintings: The Wine Grog or Afternoon in Naples, and another: The Woman with the Flea."
**These standard "early" comments on Guillemet date back to Spring Books 1948 p. 36. Unlike the improvisations of Edit-1, Rewald had always spoken kindly of Guillemet, a good friend who had been nothing but a positive force in Cézanne's life and career.
"By now a comfortable bourgeois himself, he had—through the consistent insignificance of his landscapes—even achieved a certain official status by becoming a member of the Salon jury.
This is the segue to Guillemet becoming the hero of the story of the Salon of 1882?
(Rewald)"It was finally in 1882 that he managed to have a canvas of Cézanne’s “accepted” by using the prerogative of jury members to exhibit the work of one of their students. Cézanne, who sent in a Portrait of Monsieur L. A., thus is listed in the catalogue as “pupil of Antoine Guillemet.”
(Edit-2)"It is not known which work Cezanne selected; some say it was a self-portrait (which seems unlikely). The initials L.A. could have stood for those of the artist's father, Louis-Auguste, although it appears doubtful that Cezanne would have picked such an early work, except that it was a painting Guillemet had once greatly admired."
** "It is not known which work Cezanne selected ; some say it was a self-portrait (which seems unlikely)" is historically accurate, full stop.
Like his comments on Antoine Guillemet, John Rewald had used the same comments on Portrait de M. L. A... since 1948, adding only the chronological note "Possibly a Self-Portrait". But Rewald had not previously given any opinion on the longstanding self-portrait theory, why he had chosen to bring up his doubts without an explanation is unusual, and appears timed by the editor to add credibility to the birth of the Louis-Auguste narrative.
"The initials L.A. could have stood for those of the artist's father, Louis-Auguste"
Along with every other writer in this list, Rewald had never previously mentioned the initials of the title in relation to Louis-Auguste. While the self-portrait theory is well-known, Rewald appears to have been offered the unusual Louis-Auguste initials theory by a colleague (perhaps the editor?), Rewald then doubted that Cézanne would have picked such an early work, and was reminded that "it was a painting Guillemet had once greatly admired."
The latter is hardly something Rewald would need to be reminded of, he had written extensively on the subject of that particular portrait of Louis-Auguste over several decades without ever connecting Louis-Auguste, Portrait de M. L. A..., or the Salon of 1882 in any way. If he had reason to revise his comments he would have explained doing so, relating whatever new information he was taking into consideration.
In fact, it wasn’t the painting Guillemet described in his letter to Zola, and there’s no evidence that anyone other than Guillemet and the artist ever saw it in its original form. The earliest known reference to the finished painting historically known as, "The Artist's Father, Reading L'Evénement, 1866" was in Lawton 1911 where it was simply titled "The Artist's Father".
Assuming it is the same canvas Guillemet mentioned, the artist had clearly altered it following Guillemet's letter to Zola.
As for the comment about the initials:
"The initials L.A. could have stood for those of the artist's father, Louis-Auguste", note that as regards this debut introduction of Louis-Auguste into the Portrait de M. L. A... story, the editor has removed the space between the initials. Since both of the other references to the initials on this page correctly showed a space between the L. and the A., this indicates to me that the editor probably knew there could be no space between the initials for "Louis-Auguste", therefore, the source of the Louis-Auguste narrative relied on re-arranging the initials published in the Salon Catalogue to fit the narrative.
(Rewald)"In any case, Cézanne’s portrait did not attract public attention, though a critic, taking the “pupil of Antoine Guillemet” for a novice, wrote: “Monsieur L. A. is painted with wide brushstrokes. The shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek as well as the quality of the light tones presage a future colorist.”"
(Edit-3)"The words could very well have been prompted by Cézanne’s Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cézanne Reading L’Evénement."
** John Rewald and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. have historically referred to the portrait of Louis-Auguste as, "The Artist's Father, Reading L'Evénement 1866" and Rewald had never once mused about it being a good match for Véron's description. Yes, there is a shadow on the right eye socket and cheek, yet it is about the least remarkable aspect of this painting, and the remarks about the light tones also seem out of place. Again, if Rewald had reason to change his mind, and in this case solve a century-old mystery, he wouldn't have been debating himself, he would have said so straight up and given the reasons why.
(Rewald)"However, the prerogative that had opened the back door of the Salon to Cézanne was remanded that same year, and Guillemet thus was no longer able to use his position on his friend’s behalf."
This doesn't appear to me that John Rewald had any confidence in the Louis-Auguste theory. And if some unspoken art historical breakthrough on the subject of the painting exhibited in the Salon of 1882 had been achieved, it is not reflected in the familiar biographical outline entry for the year 1882 on p. 268: "Is admitted to the Salon as “pupil” of Guillemet; exhibits a portrait of a man, which according to Riviére was a self-portrait."
If we look up the year 1882 listed in the index under "Salon, Paris" we are directed to p. 203 which reads:"But in spite of all this, Cézanne was still almost unknown in Paris and the critic Mellerio could write: “Cézanne seems to be a fantastic figure. Although still living, he is spoken of as though he were dead. A few examples of his work are owned by a small number of collectors.” Indeed, Cézanne had not exhibited in Paris since 1877, with the exception of the two canvases that had been forced on the official exhibitions of 1882 and 1889."
Doesn't it seem logical that pp. 146-147 with the "conversation" based on Rewald's traditional historical comments on the Salon of 1882 would be listed under "Salon, Paris"? Again, as with Gowing 1988, it seemed that the editor was mitigating discovery of the subterfuge. Despite Rewald's obvious doubts, the editor added both the theory about Louis-Auguste and a revised title into evidence in Rewald's 1986 biography, and another revised title, along with the 1882 Salon exhibition list entry which appears out of nowhere in Gowing 1988.
What you don't see listed among the fifty-eight bibliographical entries on the catalogue page for "Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, Father of the Artist reading L'Evénement" in Gowing 1988, is any reference to the pages with the Louis-Auguste narrative in Rewald 1986, it reads only: "Rewald, 1986, p. 23, ill.".....Why not reference pp. 146-147 where the Louis-Auguste narrative leading to the debut exhibition listing began?
One hundred and four years after the Salon of 1882, the Louis-Auguste narrative was added to Rewald's longstanding comments, two years later it is added as a historical fact in Sir Lawrence Gowing's catalogue, and Rewald's comments...the history of Cézanne and the Salon of 1882... had been replaced with the Louis-Auguste narrative, no longer a narrative, but recorded as historical fact.
And who would ever notice this harmless balancing of the books? Unless, of course, the actual lost portrait of a man exhibited in the Salon of 1882 was discovered.
Fortunately in another book by John Rewald, published the same year and by the same publisher, we have comments pertaining to the portrait of Louis-Auguste which appear to bring the matter back into the former historical narrative where there is no mention of Portrait de M. L. A... or the Salon of 1882, along with a comment regarding the lack of a signature which the painting "most likely" would have if it had been submitted to the Salon (of 1866).
"The history of the portrait of Cézanne's father reading L’Evénement (VII) is not so clear. In his letter to Zola of November 2, 1866, Guillemet had implied that Cézanne planned to take this large painting to Paris, yet there is no proof that this intention was carried out. If he had wished to submit it to the jury of the 1867 Salon, Cézanne would most likely have signed it, something he neglected to do.
Moreover, in 1870 he did submit a companion piece of identical size, the portrait of his friend Achille Emperaire, sitting in the same upholstered armchair with the same flowered slipcover (VI).(15) This picture, which is signed, was rejected; it seems most unlikely that the artist would have presented it to the jury had his quite similar portrait of the banker been refused three years earlier. The Emperaire likeness eventually turned up in the shop of pere Tanguy, who had to hide it from the painter because Cézanne had decided to destroy it.(16) Later it found its way into the collection of Auguste Pellerin in Paris whose heirs have donated it to the Louvre.
The Portrait of Cézanne’s Father Reading L’Evénement similarly wound up in the possession of Pellerin. Although Pellerin assembled the most extensive collection of paintings by Cézanne that ever existed (and began to do so while the artist was still alive), no records of his purchases are preserved. He seems to have bought from all of the Paris dealers who - mostly before the First World War - handled Cézanne's works, especially Ambroise Vollard and the Bernheim-Jeunes, but also Jos. Hessel and others.
In the absence of any information, it is impossible to establish whether the artist kept this likeness of his father or whether he disposed of it.(17) From Pellerin, it passed to the latter's daughter, Madame Rene LeCompte, in Paris before it reached the National Gallery in Washington."
15. Painted at the Jas de Bouffan, 1867-68 (Venturi No. 88). See also above 'Achille Emperaire and Cézanne,' pp 57-68.
16. See E. Bernard, Souvenirs sur Paul Cézanne (Paris, 1921), pp. 50-51.
17. A photograph of the painting in the Vollard archives shows horizontal cracks, indicating that the picture must have been rolled-up at some time (this was possibly the reason for its subsequent relining). However, the presence of such a photograph in his archives does not necessarily mean that Vollard ever owned this work.
(Studies in Impressionism - H.N. Abrams New York - 1986 p. 99)
Jayne Warman, co-author of John Rewald's 1996 Catalogue Raisonné of Cézanne's works, and co-Director of the Cézanne Online Catalogue Raisonné wrote:
"The second item, grand portrait d'homme, no size, Was valued at 40,000 francs. The painting can be identified as the Portrait of Louis Auguste Cézanne (R101), the artist’s father, at the National Gallery in Washington. Horizontal cracks shown in an old Vollard photograph indicated that the canvas had been rolled up, but it is not known if Vollard found it in that state. Had it been hanging, either pinned to the wall or stretched and leaning against the wall, it would no doubt have been described by Cézanne’s admirers who visited the studio.
But no references were made, thereby indicating that it had been rolled up out of sight.
Indeed, when two young painters, R.P. Rivière and J.P. Schnerb, visited Cézanne in Aix in January 1905, they noticed «in the corner canvases lying about, still on their stretchers or rolled up. The rolls had been left on chairs and had been crushed. His studios were in great disarray, in an unstudied disorder.» The more interesting question, perhaps, is why Cézanne kept this monumental portrait of his father for 40 years, a man with whom he had a very strained relationship and to whom he hid his liaison with Hortense Fiquet for many years. The answer may never be known."
(Societe Paul Cezanne - A.J.F. Millar 2003)
Considering it had been listed as historical fact in Gowing 1988, and Rewald et al 1996, I found it interesting that Jayne Warman did not mention Portrait de M. L. A... and the Salon of 1882 in this account.
The final entry in this list is Alain Mothe’s May 1st commentary on the Salon of 1882, published on the Société Paul Cézanne website. Mothe’s remarks on Portrait de M. L. A… clearly follow the Louis‑Auguste narrative introduced in Rewald 1986, and his opening comments repeat the same speculative reasoning that first appeared in that edition.
However, as every published reference in the preceding list demonstrates, the portrait exhibited in 1882 was considered unidentifiable by Cézanne scholars for more than a century. The artist painted multiple portraits with shadows on the right cheek; the initials “L. A…” do not correspond to “Louis‑Auguste”; and it is highly unlikely that Cézanne would both misspell his father’s initials and omit the family surname on an official Salon registration form.
When John Rewald first published the Véron description in 1935, it did not enable him — or anyone else — to identify the portrait of Louis‑Auguste as Portrait de M. L. A…. Over several decades, Rewald wrote extensively about the father portrait without ever suggesting such an identification. The connection appears only in the interpolated passages of the 1986 biography.
The only items in Mothe’s reference list not already included in my own are Zola’s preparatory notes for L’Œuvre, which contain fictionalized elements loosely inspired by Guillemet’s efforts on Cézanne’s behalf in 1882. Mothe introduces these notes with the statement: “According to Zola, this painting…,” phrasing that implies Zola was referring specifically to Portrait de M. L. A.... In fact, Zola’s notes describe a fictional painting titled The Dead Child, which bears no resemblance to either the portrait of Louis‑Auguste or the lost Salon portrait. The fictional painting is explicitly described as signed, whereas the portrait of Louis‑Auguste is unsigned — one of the principal reasons it was never associated with the 1882 Salon in more than a century of scholarship.
Mothe then juxtaposes Zola’s fictional account with a truncated version of Vollard’s historical one, creating the impression that both refer to the same event. Vollard’s full statement makes clear that Guillemet attempted to save Cézanne’s submission during the second round of jury voting and ultimately used the jury privilege of admitting a student’s work “for his charity.” Zola’s notes, by contrast, are a dramatized reworking of this anecdote for a novel whose characters alienated the very artists they were based on. Mothe’s conflation of these two unrelated texts — one fictional, one historical — results in a narrative that mixes fact and invention.
The same conflation appears in Mothe’s concluding assertion that Véron’s description “allows us to identify the portrait of his father Louis‑Auguste Cézanne.” This conclusion is not supported by the sources he cites. Véron’s brief remark — “Monsieur L. A. is quite broadly brushed… the shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek…” — could apply to any number of Cézanne’s portraits. No early writer, including Rewald, ever connected this description to the father portrait. The identification appears only after the interpolated passages of Rewald 1986 and the unexplained exhibition listing added in Gowing 1988.
In short, Mothe’s entry illustrates how the Louis‑Auguste attribution has been repeated without scrutiny. By quoting Zola’s fictional notes as though they referred to Portrait de M. L. A…, and by selectively summarizing Vollard’s account, Mothe inadvertently blends fiction and history. More importantly, several of the references he cites — including Zola, Vollard, and the Salon catalogue itself — contradict the conclusion he draws from them. His entry thus provides a clear example of how the 1986–1988 narrative has been adopted without reconciling it with earlier sources.
May 1 – June 20
For the first and only time, a painting by Cezanne, “Portrait of Mr. L. A…”, is exhibited at the Salon, Palais des Champs-Élysées. The description given by the critic Théodore Véron allows us to identify the portrait of his father Louis-Auguste Cezanne, FWN402-R101:
"Mr. L. A. is quite broadly brushed in the paste. The shadow of the eye socket and that of the right cheek, along with the quality of the tone of the lights, promise a colorist in the future."
Véron Théodore, 8e Annuaire. Dictionnaire Véron, ou Organe de l’Institut universel des sciences, des lettres et des arts du XIXe siècle (section des beaux-arts). Salon de 1882, Paris, M. Bazin, 1882, p. 113.
His address is still 32, rue de l'Ouest. Cezanne declared himself a "student of Guillemet," who was one of the forty members elected to the jury of the painting section. The exhibition that year was organized by the Society of French Artists.
“CEZANNE (Paul) born in Aix (Bouches-du-Rhône), student of M. Guillemet. — Rue de l’Ouest, 32 520 — Portrait of M. L. A…”
Explanation of the works of painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and lithography by living artists exhibited at the Palais des Champs-Élysées on May 1, 1882, Society of French Artists for the Fine Arts Exhibition of 1882, Salon of 1882, 99th exhibition since the year 1673, Paris, Charles de Mourgues Frères, printers of the national museums, 1882, 522 pages, Cezanne p. 46, “Regulations” p. CIII-CXII.
Dumas F.-G (published under the direction of), Illustrated catalogue of the Salon, containing approximately 400 reproductions based on the original drawings of the artists, work approved by the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts, Paris, Librairie d’art L. Baschet, 1882, 335 pages, Cezanne p. XXVI.
****
According to Zola, this painting, which only received the votes of Guillemet and Henner, was nevertheless accepted because it was ranked number 1 during the review of rejected paintings. According to Vollard, it was thanks to Guillemet that Cezanne was accepted, who, as a member of the jury, allegedly used "the privilege of bringing a painting by one of his students into the Salon, without any examination." This custom, said to be charitable, does not appear in the exhibition regulations. Zola describes it in his preparatory notes for L'Œuvre:
Guillemet Notes
[…] From the jury
[…] Charity. Everyone has the right to "a charity." They say, "I'll take it for a charity. Do it for a charity." There are forty people who have been repudiated at the last minute. They do it especially for a poor fellow who is dying of hunger. The story of Pierson, who is made to pass to Bin as a starving man, and from whom he receives a still life for his charity. A young juror jokes to get votes. They say to him: Do you take it for your charity? And his embarrassment, if he has another one in sight. The catches: You dishonor the jury. ― You don't know anything about it. ― I know as much about it as you. The mistakes with the hors concours. ― When a jury member's painting passes, we elbow each other to avoid making a blunder: "Be careful, it's by so-and-so." The exclamations: what's the pig... The jury is now eclectic. Lots of registered mail, the little notebooks.
The discussions are never very serious. We bicker without eating each other too much. Sometimes we stand for ten minutes in front of a painting, the Manets. There is a vote, and a counter-proof. We say: I request the vote, the vote is requested, for a canvas we are discussing, which does not immediately have a visible majority. The majority is half plus one. ― So, a latent hatred, good nature, handshakes. But there are the nice ones and the not-so-nice ones: the latter never get anything, the others often get what they want voted for, through skill and gaiety. To impose, ask while laughing.
The case and the sene [senna]: Cabanel especially, conciliatory, good man. The painters of the Institute behave. ― A turnip, a bad painting ― Bouguereau presides very well, very cold, very fair. ― Each session has a report, signed in the evening. An attendance sheet. ― The first painting and the last judged are received by right. ― The jurors are exhausted at the end, and they reap nothing but hatred.
The story of Guillemet. He wants to make Cabanel take a turnip, saying that the painter has 3 children. Cabanel, after protesting, proposes the painting. Bouguereau's anger, seeing that Guillemet is voting; and G.'s remark "it's Cabanel who is asking for it", which brings the jury ― For Cezanne, laughter at the easel. Guillemet asks. Henner votes alone with him: "it's not that bad; it looks like a tapestry." ― The jurors who look at the signature. Cabanel, to refuse: "That! That!" And he bends down, sees the name: "No. 1, gentlemen!" ― Gervex's remark to Guillemet: "If you support this, it's so that we put your name in the newspapers." Gervex, very rude, flatters the School. ― On the latest artists: "She is so pretty," when a member recommends one. Not gallant, but joking.
Émile Zola, The Rougon-Macquart: The Works, preparatory file, Paris, National Library of France, Department of Manuscripts, New French Acquisitions, 10316, folio 383.
****
Chapter 10 — The painting is sent, one day Claude meets Fagerolles, who calls him his old man, and takes him to his studio. A small hotel across from Irma's, a large one.[…] He says to Claude: I'll get you admitted. A word from The Dead Child. Come see me on the evening of the counting, if I'm nominated. How Claude goes.Claude at the counting. The whole scene described, but quickly. Fagerolles is nominated. And the transition to arrive at the jury's proceedings, probably by Bongrand, who was also nominated, without being able to defend himself, put on Fagerolles's list. He meets Claude. He speaks to him, with [unread word] no doubt. Then the jury scene, where he defended The Dead Child without succeeding in getting it accepted. Mazel is president, all the scenes if I may. And the last one, during the draft, Fagerolles took Claude's painting for "his charity." He went to Claude's house to tell him, or something else.
****
Vollard, Ambroise, Paul Cezanne, Paris, Les éditions Georges Crès & Cie, 1924 (1st edition, Paris, Galerie A. Vollard, 1914, 187 pages; 2nd edition 1919), 247 pages, p. 63: "Undeterred, Cezanne sent two paintings to the Salon each year, always rejected, when suddenly, in 1882, he had the joy of learning that one of his submissions, a portrait, had just been accepted! But it must be added that he entered the Salon through the back door. His friend Guillemet, who was on the jury and had tried in vain to save him in the second round, had taken him "for his charity": any member of the jury then had the privilege of admitting the painting of one of his students to the Salon, without any examination. The booklet for the 1882 Salon therefore bears this note, page 46: Cezanne Paul, pupil of M. Guillemet, Portrait of M. L. A. (3) (3).
(3) Despite all my efforts, it was absolutely impossible for me to discover either the full name of the model for this painting, or, above all, what exactly this painting itself was.
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Rivière, Georges, Le Maître Paul Cezanne, Paris, H. Floury publisher, 1923, 242 pages, pp. 93-94: "Although Guillemet, using the right granted to him by his position as a member of the Jury, succeeded in getting his friend into the 1882 Salon, no one noticed the portrait, certainly small in size, which, no doubt on orders, the exhibition curators placed in such a way that no one could see it."
****
Mack, Gerstle, The Life of Paul Cezanne, Paris, Gallimard, "nrf", collection "Contemporaries Seen Closely", 2nd series, no. 7, 1938, 362 pages, p. 231: "One of the reasons that drew Cezanne to Paris that spring was the assurance of finally seeing his life's ambition realized: to exhibit a painting at the Salon! The acceptance of a Cezanne painting into the hallowed precincts of the "Salon de Bouguereau" did not, however, mean that this venerable institution had suddenly changed its way of thinking. It so happened that in 1882, Antoine Guillemet was a member of the jury, and according to the rules in force, each member had the privilege of introducing a painting to the Salon without having to submit it to the jury.
It was said that such works were received "for charity" - an unflattering expression, but one which well conveyed the contemptuous spirit in which they were accepted. A painting approved in this way was generally the work of a pupil of the juror who sponsored it. There could be no question of considering Cezanne as a pupil of Guillemet, but the rules were not very strict, and the good Guillemet succeeded in having his friend's canvas accepted "for charity."
Knowing Cezanne's susceptibility, one might think he would have felt deeply humiliated by such an undignified subterfuge, but he had hoped with all his might, for so many years, to see one of his paintings at the Salon that he was not at all inclined to turn up his nose when such an opportunity presented itself. He knew he had no hope of being admitted otherwise: he had been refused too many times to maintain any illusions in this regard. The only way for him to realize his ambition was to take advantage of Guillemet's intervention, and he gratefully accepted the opportunity offered him.
There is every reason to believe that Cezanne himself had proposed the maneuver to Guillemet and that the possibility of entering the Salon through what Vollard very aptly calls "the back door" - since the front door was forbidden to him - had been haunting his mind for a long time. Guillemet had tried several times to persuade various juries to officially accept a painting by Cezanne, but without success. Cezanne was aware of these attempts: as early as June 3, 1879, he had written to Zola:
"Perhaps you heard that I paid a little insinuating visit to my friend Guillemet, who, it is said, patronized me with the jury—alas, without return, from those hard-hearted judges." Why "insinuating," unless Cezanne, knowing that Guillemet would soon be on the jury, had proposed or at least accepted the solution that was finally adopted?
On August 22, 1880, Zola wrote to Guillemet from Médan: "Paul... is still counting on you for what you know. He told me about the excellent morning you spent together. And I have been asked to send you all his affection." Zola's discreet "for what you know" could mean anything, but it almost surely refers to Guillemet's promise to facilitate Cezanne's admission to the Salon.
(Alaine Mothe - Societe Paul Cézanne Timeline Entry - May 1 1882)
One hundred and nineteen years after the artist's death, it is a bit sad to think that Cézanne's iconic portrait of Louis-Auguste, hidden away for forty years, held no sentimental value to his heirs upon its discovery. After all, Louis-Auguste had supported Hortense and Paul Jr. all along, albeit unknowingly.
But we might recall that in 1878, Louis-Auguste had discovered that his son had both a mistress and a child, and that the elder Cézanne had tried his best to persuade his son to rid himself of the financial burdon by threatening to cut-off his allowance.
For Paul Cézanne, the thought of having to give up his painting to find a job must have amounted to sheer torture. Indeed, there came a point when Cézanne had asked Émile Zola to be prepared to assist him in finding a job, in the event his father should cut him off financially. Although the worst case scenario never came to pass, for a time Louis-Auguste had cut his son's monthly allowance in half, and Cézanne was often forced to borrow money from Zola, who had generously offered to help with financial assistance as necessary.
It was not until 1886 that Louis-Auguste finally consented to Paul's marriage to Hortense Fiquet, and since it was later that same year that Louis-Auguste passed away, I think it can be safely assumed that the only emotion the artist's wife and son had ever felt for Louis-Auguste was fear. Therefore, the thought that they would have had an aversion to keeping the long lost portrait of Louis-Auguste following the artist's death seems much less callous than at first glance.
We take all of the artist's works for granted now, but I suspect that many of Cézanne's works which were sold by his heirs, perhaps the majority, had never been seen.
Although the flare-up that followed Louis-Auguste's discovery of the artist's secret domestic situation lasted only a year or so, the threat of further conflict seems to have remained just below the surface of the relationship between Cézanne and his father. As an indication of Cézanne's mental state in 1882, the year that he supposedly submitted The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 to the Salon, we must consider the subject of a letter which Cézanne had written to Zola later that same year, as recounted by John Rewald:
"Four years before his marriage, Paul Cézanne had thought of making his will because, being of an anxious disposition, he thought himself destined to die young. But he made fun of his own fears, and wrote to Zola: 'I am thin and can do nothing for you. As I shall be the first to go, I shall arrange with the All-Highest to reserve a good place for you.'
In November 1882 Cézanne wrote to Zola asking his advice concerning his will. His father, who had retired from the bank after the war of 1870, had placed his fortune in the name of his children in order to avoid inheritance taxes. Feared by his children for his authoritarian temper, Louis-Auguste Cézanne knew that he could trust them not to touch the fortune which, though legally theirs, he continued to administer. While not using this money, Paul Cézanne was entitled to bequeath it to whomever he wished, and he decided to leave half of it to his mother, and half to his son. He asked Zola to keep a copy of it for him and sent it to him from L'Estaque in May 1883, after having consulted a lawyer in Marseilles. This will must have been revised after Cézanne's marriage".
This story seems to suggest that the artist had continued to suffer a great deal of stress which was related to his father's threats, almost to the point of being worried to death, so to speak. If as the Louis-Auguste theory suggests, Cézanne had submitted the large unsigned 1866 portrait of his father to the Salon of 1882, the grand gesture appears to have gone unnoticed.
In his biography of Cézanne, Gerstle Mack summed-up Louis-Auguste's feelings as regards his son's choice of profession:
"Louis-Auguste had swallowed his disappointment and had resigned himself to the idea that his son was going to be a painter. The banker's capitulation was never more than passive. He could not bring himself to approve whole-heartedly of Paul's unfortunate choice of career, nor did he ever take the least interest in, or show the least understanding of, the painter's work, theories, and ideals."
(Paul Cézanne - Alfred A. Knopf, 1935 pg 154)
If this were the case, it hardly seems logical that Cézanne would have been willing to honor his father by sweeping aside all that he had achieved over the past decade working with Pissarro and exhibiting with the Impressionists, in order to simply forgive and forget the rejection of his work by both the Salon and his father alike.
I think it is much more logical to propose that Cézanne would have submitted a painting to honor his Impressionist colleagues and the father of his painting, Camille Pissarro.
The only other scenario I can think of to substantiate the Louis-Auguste theory, would be in order to commemorate Émile Zola's articles criticizing the Salon which were published in "L'Evénement" in 1866. (presumably the theme for The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866.)
Yet this scenario seems just as wasteful of Cézanne's golden opportunity as the previous scenario, and perhaps even more so. Zola had published comments in a series of articles following the Salon of 1880, which were to accompany a letter written to the Minister by Renoir and Monet protesting the "skying" of their works which had been grudgingly accepted that year.
Zola's comments in 1880 were far less sympathetic to the painters who had become known as the Impressionists than the 1866 articles in "L'Evénement" had been, and in his conclusion, it seemed as though Zola had wanted to wash his hands of Impressionism.
"The real misfortune is that no artist of this group has achieved powerfully and definitely the new formula which, scattered through their works, they all offer. The formula is there, endlessly diffused; but in no place, among any of them, is it to be found applied by a master. They are all forerunners. The man of genius has not arisen. We can see what they intend and find them right, but we seek in vain the masterpiece that is to lay down the formula and make heads bow before it. That is why the battle of the impressionists has not yet ended; they remain inferior to what they undertake; they stammer without being able to find the word."
(Paul Cézanne - Rewald - Spring Books, 1948, page 109)
Given Zola's comments of 1880, Cézanne could not have had any misconceptions as to whether Zola understood his art, nor the art of his Impressionist friends, and therefore would have had no reason to dredge up the portrait of his father reading "L'Evénement" in order to honor Zola. Besides, after Zola's 1880 abandonment of the Impressionists, what purpose would be served by reminding anyone of what Zola had written in "L'Evénement"?
If one accepts the logical premise that the artist had toned down his overt aggression towards the Salon regime to quietly exhibit the painting of his choice in the Salon of 1882, a portrait of his father reading "L'Evénement" hardly seems appropriate as a peace offering. I don't for one moment believe that Cézanne was not firmly in attack mode when he selected his submission for the Salon of 1882, but that he had changed his tactics from a frontal attack to psychological warfare.
Additionally, we must remember that in 1882, the painting now known as The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 did not yet historically exist, it was discovered rolled-up following the artist's death.
Other than the initials L. A. (which are not a valid abbreviation of Louis-Auguste), and the mention of Guillemet discussing a different painting, I have yet to find a discussion of the logic behind the Louis-Auguste theory.
What perplexed me the most was to be informed that John Rewald had ultimately accepted the Louis-Auguste theory (if he had indeed done so), for it had been Rewald's translation from the Dictionnaire Véron, and his comments on Portrait de M. L. A... published in 1948 which had provided me the basic description of the picture in the first place. And, like all of the other authors I have studied including Sir Lawrence, prior to his 1986 biography, Rewald had never made any connection between Portrait de M. L. A... or the Salon of 1882 with The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866.
The Louis-Auguste theory can only be interpreted as the presumption that; given carte blanche to submit a painting of his choice which would be allowed to circumvent the vote of the jury, Cézanne chose to submit a sixteen year-old unsigned portrait of his father, with a title that misspelled his forename and omitted the family surname. As one who has studied the life of Cézanne, it is difficult to imagine the circumstances which would lead John Rewald to that conclusion without compelling evidence, and certainly not on the misrepresented initials alone.
Whether viewed on a personal level based on what is known of Cézanne's often turbulent relationship with his father at that time, or on a technical level based on his studies with Pissarro and his exhibitions with the Impressionists during the 1870's, it is difficult to accept any theory in which Cézanne would have chosen to simply turn his back on over fifteen years of crucial development as a painter when finally presented an opportunity to exhibit in the Salon.
Cézanne had fought long and hard, both for his friends and for himself against the Salon regime's stranglehold on which styles of painting were to be considered worthy of public exhibition.
The theory that Cézanne would have arrived at the open gates of "Bouguereau's Salon" with a relic from 1866, implies he had no interest in showing either the public, or the Salon regime what he was capable of as a painter. It would have also implied that his technique had not advanced from that relatively dark, primitive era of his career.
Returning to the ambiguous comments in Rewald 1986: "It is not known which work Cezanne selected; some say it was a self-portrait (which seems unlikely). The initials L.A. could have stood for those of the artist's father, Louis-Auguste, although it appears doubtful that Cézanne would have picked such an early work, except that it was a painting Guillemet had once greatly admired."
Based on Rewald's previous non-committal reference to a self-portrait, by implying Rewald thought it unlikely, the anonymous editor seems to have overlooked the Portrait de l'artiste au fond rose c.1875 (FWN 436), which is a small self-portrait which answers the description from the Dictionnaire Véron as accurately as the portrait of Louis-Auguste does, as well as the size as described by Leclerc and Rivière, and like the portrait of the artist's father, it is unlikely Cézanne would have submitted his self-portrait to the Salon without a signature.
It made perfect sense to say "it appears doubtful that Cézanne would have picked such an early work".
By 1882 Cézanne had exhibited a total of seventeen oil paintings in public with the Impressionists, of that number none were earlier than 1873, and the only portrait of a man was Portrait de Victor Chocquet 1876-77 (FWN 437) which was one of the Impressionist era portraits I had originally found similar to The Fisherman.
If Cézanne submitted a portrait of a man to the Salon of 1882, the odds are good that it was one executed in the mid-1870s, and in the case of The Fisherman, it would have represented the portrait of the same figure highlighted against the sail in the figure composition Scene Fantastique exhibited in the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877.
As for the theory that he might have chosen the portrait of his father because Guillemet had admired it, Guillemet had admired a painting which he described as The Artist's Father Reading "Le Siècle".
As with the unexplained self-portrait theories, writers didn't go too far in trying to guess who the initials "L. A." belonged to, and as one who has spent a great deal of time studying the possibilities, I believe the answer can only be found by thinking like Cézanne.
The decade of the 1870s featured many of Cézanne's pictorial puzzles begging the viewer to find the hidden messages, and I believe that The Fisherman may represent a Rosetta Stone for some of those mysteries, and vice versa.
To attempt to decypher the narrative figure compositions of the 1870s is a deep rabbit hole, the paintings often seem like episodes from the Twilight Zone. Through the filter of The Fisherman, many of the narratives seem linked to the artist's evolution. Without the context of The Fisherman, the entire series of pictorial puzzles is subject to misinterpretation.
I believe The Fisherman was another of the artist's "jackalopes", composed as a study tool incorporating his facial/ear studies based on Voltaire's head and ears, the final manifestation of the Uncle Dominique portrait mode, built around his own form taken from a photo. I have often wondered if this was somehow where the self-portrait theory had originated.
I believe The Fisherman had been kept hidden away both before and after the Salon of 1882, and I theorize that while he had originally painted it as a tribute to Pissarro, following the disappointment of the Salon of 1882 he may have gifted it to Adolphe Monticelli whom he had also venerated. In effect, he may have exiled the important painting out of the fear that he might destroy it. I believe the painting was then purchased from Monticelli's estate following his death in 1886, along with the figure composition by Monticelli which arrived in the same container which carried The Fisherman to Southern California.
This open composition with arms and hands and the tilted jug creating depth is found in many future portraits. Once recognized as a sail, the unusual background presents a diagonal of depth as the sail hanging taut from the mast slightly behind out of scene to the right, gently billows toward the figure reflecting light, and the sail lapping against the figure's back creates shade and a ripple effect directly behind him.
The figure painting from the same era I believe to be a companion work, features a similar effect where the sail is billowing towards the figures creating sunlit spots billowing out of the shade which highlight the fisherman figure I believe to be the same subject as The Fisherman.
But Cézanne's prototype portrait study in creating depth had been The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866, in which he had gone beyond the depth created with arms or legs, by also including the wall and the still-life in the background which allow the viewer to perceive the varying distances. This was a major development.
The evolution this portrait represented did not come to fruition until the early 1870s. It's not a coincidence that the artist's portrait evolution incorporating descriptive backgrounds came about with the final installment in the series of three portraits of his father.
Portrait de Louis-Auguste Cezanne, père de l'artiste c.1870 FWN 430
Alternate titles: Portrait de L. A. Cèzanne, Père de l'artiste; Portrait de M. Cézanne Père; Portrait du père de l'artiste; Portrait of the Artist's Father; The Artist's Father: Louis-Auguste Cézanne.
Rewald (178): c.1870; Venturi revised: c.1872; Venturi (227): 1875–76; Rivière: c.1877; Reff: 1874–75
This portrait of Louis-Auguste seems to have made amends for the previous version which the painter had hidden away. There is nothing provocative in this powerful portrayal of his father, only respect. This painting was likely visible around the Jas de Bouffon over the years as it was refined. This was technical evolution.
This portrait is thought to date to the period of the Franco-Prussian war during the time the artist was hiding in the Jas de Bouffon to avoid conscription into the military. I believe this portrait evolved over a period of time during which the background was added, and it also perhaps became the first recipient of the artist's ear studies of the early 1870s.
The reasons for this particular pose seem to be to correct his original portrait of his father, FWN 398 Portrait de Louis-Auguste Cezanne, père de l'artiste c.1865,(detail) which features a prime example of what I refer to as the early "teacup handle ears" which he was correcting with his ear studies based on Voltaire's ears after both Houdon and Pigalle. Comparing the two portraits, it is also quite obvious that his portrait technique had evolved in many other ways.
**Note: The online catalogue lists among the alternate titles for FWN 430, "Portrait de L. A. Cèzanne".
I speculated earlier that Louis-Auguste's name had been added to the title of The Artist's Father Reading "L'Evénement" 1866 to insinuate the initials in Portrait de M. L. A..., and the alternate title assigned to FWN 430 seems to be another attempt to substantiate the initials "L. A.".
The forename of the artist's father is "Louis-Auguste", according to French typography rules, on an official document it should be written L.-A., in everyday's life LA and on a simple document, L.A., but the initials of the hyphenated forename Louis-Auguste are never separated by a space.
In describing the father of the artist in any biographic text or title of a portrait, it would be incorrect to spell or abbreviate the name Louis-Auguste as "Louis Auguste" or "L. A.".
A deep dive down the Salon catalogue rabbit hole revealed a spectrum of exceptions where a title initial may be followed a single surname initial, the full surname, the full forename followed with a surname initial, etc. These exceptions may have been based on the artist's master, and possibly current or previous awards won.
In some cases where there is no specific name, it may be "Portrait of a young girl", or "Portrait of my Grandmother" without any abbreviations.
In most cases where the subject is named, and the fully abbreviated titles were applied, "Portrait de" was followed by various title initials such as;
M. - Monsieur (Mr./Mister)
Mme - Madame (Mrs.)
Mlle - Mademoiselle (Miss)
The initials which followed titles always end with (space)X...
(X = Surname initial).
Monsieur Jean Bardot - M. J. B...
Monsieur Jean Antoine Bardot - M. J. A. B...
Monsieur Jean-Antoine Bardot - M. J.A. B...
(aka M. JA B..., M. J.-A. B...)
Monsieur Jean-Antoine de Bardot - M. J.A. de B...
(aka M. JA de B..., M. J.-A. de B...)
Portrait de M. L. A... would represent M. for Monsieur - space - a single forename beginning with "L" - space - a single surname beginning with "A".
I have to admit that it is possible that if the portrait was registered at the Salon as "Portrait de Monsieur Louis Auguste" without the surname Cézanne, the catalogue may have interpreted "Auguste" as the surname, thus M. L. A....
This unlikely theory relies on the artist misspelling his own father's name on the registration form, omitting his family surname from the title, and then submitting the portrait of his father without his signature on the only painting he managed to have exhibited in the Salon in nineteen years.
To put that into perspective, out of the twenty works Cézanne exhibited in public with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877, only three were unsigned.
I invite the reader to study the catalogue of the Salon of 1882 on their own, the two abbreviated portraits by Henri Fantin-Latour I referred to are on page 88, but with diligence and the internet you might manage to decipher other abbreviations and verify them through their exhibition records...bonne chance!
Explication Des Ouvrages De Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture, Gravure Et Lithographie Des Vivants Exposés Au Palais Des Champs-Elysées Le 1 mai 1882 - Charles De Mourgues Fréres - Paris, 1882
The absence of the Salon registration always puzzled me, but after thirty-seven years of studying Paul Cézanne, it seems entirely plausible that he labeled it as "Portrait de M. L. A..." because it represented a character he invented for one of his pictorial puzzles. As the modern saying goes, "if you know, you know"." He wasn't going to spoil the opportunity for a pictorial puzzle, especially when it was the key to the series of puzzles which he produced throughout the previous decade.
As the most important painting of his career to that point, he would have had a lot he wanted to convey to the Salon regime. Unlike his earlier works submitted to the Salon, this one had to explain everything, his evolution, his work ethic, life, death, and remembrance. In the case of The Fisherman he has accurately predicted that he would grow old working with canvas outdoors in the bright sunlight.
Any theory on the initials requires a comprehensive explanation, and mine is based on one of those narrative figure compositions.
I will offer my theory in an excerpt from my studies of Houdon's bust of Voltaire from The Fisherman homepage:
As the years passed, I continued searching for additional images of Voltaire to compare with the artist's drawings and the painting of The Fisherman. I became fascinated by the fact that in almost every image I had found of Voltaire, whether in paintings, etchings, pastels, or statues, he was traditionally depicted with his trademark grin.
It seemed like more than an extraordinary coincidence that the subject of Cézanne's front facing drawing, and the subject of The Fisherman would be among the very few likenesses of Voltaire in which he was not portrayed with a smile. On the part of Cézanne, this was not surprising, for the artist habitually avoided portraying any of his subjects with a smile......right?
I think it goes back to looking at Cézanne's life and works through the filter of The Fisherman, without it the question of Voltaire being carefully depicted without the smile that so defined his personality might never be asked, and even though Chappuis had posted the side by side photos of the bust and the study, he hadn't mentioned the artist's omission of that defining detail.
There was a time when asking something as simple as "did Cézanne ever paint portrait sitters and other figures with smiles?" would have been nearly impossible to answer, as it was too hard to view enough of his works to form an accurate conclusion. Fortunately, we now have the Cézanne Online Catalogue Raisonné and I can view images of all of the artist's portraits and figure paintings, and have a definitive answer in less than half an hour. Simply amazing!
Among Cézanne's portraits I found an unfinished study in oil of a smiling Paul Jr c. 1885 (FWN 470) which appears to be Cézanne's only portrait subject painted with a smile.
Among the artist's figure paintings, I noted a few more subjects with facial expressions which might be interpreted as being smiles. From that small group of possibles, I was surprised to find there was one subject who not only seemed to be smiling, but also appeared central to the theme of the painting.
In Cézanne's painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe ca 1870 (FWN 610), we find a setting and theme which hardly seem related to Manet's Déjeuner. I had seen smaller plates of this painting many times in books without noticing the details.
Seeing it in a large magnified image, what I found most fascinating about this subject, was his remarkable resemblance to the man whose smiling visage, or lack thereof in Cézanne's drawing and my painting, had inspired the search in the first place..... Voltaire... and dressed as the artist had often depicted fishermen in his figure compositions, in a long sleeved white shirt.Something that jumps out at me through the filter of The Fisherman, is the fact that this depiction of Voltaire does not appear to be based on Houdon's bust, it is a much younger Voltaire.
I have studied Voltaire for nearly as long as I have studied Cézanne, and one of the first things I learned from John Rewald was that: "Cézanne was a diligent student, especially interested in dead languages. For two sous he would turn out a hundred lines of Latin, and during his school years he frequently won prizes for calculus, Greek and Latin, science, and history."
(Paul Cézanne - Spring Books 1948 p. 5)
Among the first things I learned about Voltaire were the various theories of how he came up with the nom de plume Voltaire, and since Cezanne's forte had been Latin, one particular theory found at the Wikipedia article had remained in my memory: "Arouet adopted the name Voltaire in 1718, following his incarceration at the Bastille. Its origin is unclear. *It is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of le jeune ("the young")".
*Attributed to Christopher Thacker - Voltaire - Taylor & Francis. 1971 p. 3
The Latinized surname remained a blinking light in my mind, and it was during a 2025 update to my Portrait de M. L. A... Studies page that the AROVET LI anagram explanation by Thacker again came to mind during my umpteenth study into the possible interpretations of the initials M. L. A....
I wondered how Thacker had interpreted "LI" as "Le Jeune"?
When I located a .pdf of Thacker's book online and looked up the reference, I found that Thacker's exact words were: "He changed his name to Voltaire—probably an anagram on AROVET Le Ieune, or Arouet junior".
Thacker's interpretations took a bit of thought to translate as the "initial letters" for le jeune are "l & j", and the Latin translation of "the young" is simply iuvenis. After considerable searching through various biographies, I found the explanation was that in the 18th century the letters U & J were typographically interchangeable with V & I, respectively.
At face value, the explanation seemed plausible, yet Voltaire was famously known as a juggler of words, and like Cezanne, was well-versed in Greek and Latin at a young age, so I wondered if there were other possible interpretations. Voltaire could have made a play on both French and Latin by adding "le" to the Latin word for young, "iuvenes", to arrive at the initials "LI". Whether translating the French words "jeune (young)" or "le jeune (the young)", the Latin translates to iuvenes and iuvenis respectively, there is no L. Furthermore, the interpretation is in the eye of the beholder as to whether LI came before or after AROVET, the anagram Voltaire applies to either.
Along with the U=V, both the "Le Iuvenes" and "Le Ieune" arrangements appear to have added the L&I to the anagram Voltaire to make possible the reversal of the syllables of Airvault, his Maternal family home town in the Poitou region.
I found it very interesting that the arrangement "AROVET LI" could be expressed "Arouet the young" differentiating father and son, or as LI AROVET "the young Arouet", which was what Cézanne had carefully depicted in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. It appears possible that Cézanne had seized upon the same Voltairian wordplay logic to create the persona "LI AROVET" as a name for this figure based on the likeness of Voltaire.
As regards a title for the portrait, the rearranged Latinized spelling also formatted the surname to fit French typography where the surname comes last.
I suspect this figure of a young Voltaire had been conceived as a puzzle challenge for his childhood friend Émile Zola to sort out among the other characters and clues in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and that his inclusion in that work was an indication that he was a subject of ongoing or future studies.
To me this was the same unusual attention to detail as the Voltaire/Pissarro figure highlighted in front of the sail in Scene Fantastique, carefully detailed to be recognizable as the Voltaire/Pissarro figure from its companion portrait The Fisherman.
It is also interesting that the figure in the foreground of Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe would be posed in such an obvious manner pointing at him with an open thumb suggesting the letter V. This figure seems to be saying "look at Voltaire". Through the filter of The Fisherman and in the context of the artist's studies of Voltaire, two aspects of this figure which seem exaggerated to me are this figure's bald, skull-like head, and his large "jug handle" ear. This was the artist's old style "teacup handle" portrait ear on steroids.
Putting aside some of the dramatic psychoanalysis of this painting, the Femme Fatale offering the forbidden fruit, etc., I see nothing out of the ordinary, just people in the park, which had been a theme the artist had often used during that period. However, the smiling Voltaire figure, that huge ear, and the skull-like head are extraordinary. These oddities suggest the ongoing ear, head, and skull studies based on Voltaire.
The upturned top hat should be noticed too. Among the series of pictorial puzzles of the 1870s, there are two featuring upturned top hats which are associated with a figure, FWN 610 Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and FWN 628 Une moderne Olympia.
Additionally, there are two figure compositions from that era which include top hats which are shown right-side up, yet are not associated with any figure, both of which are literally levitating in mid-air, FWN 634 Les Pêcheurs and FWN 649 L'Éternel Féminin. Interestingly, all four of these figure compositions feature a subject thought by some to represent the artist.
In my opinion based on decades of study, since there are no photos showing the artist wearing a top hat, and among the eight self-portraits where the artist is wearing a head covering none feature a top hat, the two with upturned top hats are not plausible as narrative self-portraits.
The two paintings with the disassociated right-side up floating top hats both feature figures who are plausible as narrative self-portraits of the artist.
It is a great coincidence that in another painting featuring the Voltaire figure, this time highlighted in front of the sail in Les Pêcheurs aka Scene Fantastique, we see a similarly obvious clue from the artist. This time, the figure shown from behind in the left foreground has been highlighted against a sandy background, and his right elbow and walking stick have been painted in a way which suggests the letter "M". In fact, it appears to have been re-touched to exaggerate it with a point. I believe this figure represented Manet, turning away from the Impressionists in 1874, while Pissarro and Cézanne watch from the boat.
Just as I had done, in composing Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, the artist must have sought out additional depictions of Voltaire, and for some reason he had uncharacteristically painted a recognizable likeness of him, smile and all, with blond hair in the manner of Maurice Quentin de La Tour.
(Cézanne: The Early Years 1859 - 1872 p. 25)
There seems to be some misconception that Cézanne was the country bumpkin from Aix, and that Émile Zola was the intellectual of their youth.
They had both grown up with similar tastes in music, art and literature, and they and their friends had shared spirited conversations on many subjects and Cézanne's voice had always served him well.
Later in their adult lives, anyone who could read, could understand the words published in Zola's novels, writers can describe fictional characters in ways that allow the reader to "know" that character, to like or dislike them.
During the artist's lifetime very few people would ever view Cézanne's paintings, much less understand the language of his art. It would be like giving Zola's books to someone who can't read. It seems clear that Cézanne's intellect allowed him to understand Zola's novels, but Zola's intellect could not grasp the significance of Cézanne's art.
Despite Zola's financial success as an author, it seems that in the end Cézanne's brush was mightier than Zola's pen in terms of discovery, innovation, and historical significance. Zola's bones reside inside The Pantheon in Paris, yet Cézanne's works reside in great museums around the World.
As for financial success during their lives, Zola wins hands-down. Yet it would be interesting to see a comparison of the value of their combined works. I would conservatively guess that the value of just the paintings which Cézanne had gifted to Zola, would now exceed the value of Zola's income from all of his books combined. Ironically, the most valuable books produced by Zola are likely the one's he gifted to Cézanne.
It is doubtful that anyone at the Salon would have realized that Cézanne had invoked Houdon's bronze bust of Voltaire heroically facing death in the year he died, and that he had then risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of insurrection as an aging fisherman facing a similar fate, as predicted by his head transforming into a skull, and inevitably becoming immortalized in bronze.
I think Cézanne had reserved The Fisherman from his Impressionist period specifically to be his message for the Salon. The painting would have provided the greatest contrast to Bouguereau's pink-faced girls, and at the same time it would have showcased his studies of light, atmosphere, color, and portrait composition from the apogee of his Impressionist period.
Above all, as the chosen weapon of his psychological warfare, I believe Portrait de M. L. A... would have been imbued with the symbolism which would convey all that he had wanted to declare to the likes of M. Bouguereau and those who had barred him from the Salon for so long, that is the love of painting outdoors instilled in him by Camille Pissarro, and the hope of growing old working en plein-air, feeling the warmth of the Sun on his face.
Explication Des Ouvrages De Peinture, Sculpture, Architecture, Gravure Et Lithographie Des Artistes Vivants Exposés Au Palais Des Champs-Elysées Le 1 MAI 1882 - Charles De Mourgues Fréres - Paris. 1882 p.46
Catalogue Illustré du Salon - F.-G. Dumas (François-Guillaume) - Paris Librarie D'Art - L. Baschet 1882 p. XXVI
Théodore Véron (Dictionnaire Véron - Chez M. Bazin - Paris, 1882 p. 113)
Théodore Duret (Histoire des Peintres Impressionnistes - H. Floury - Paris, 1906 pp. 184-85)
Theodore Duret (Manet and the French Impressionists – J.B. Lippincott Company - Philadelphia, 1910 pp. 184-185)
James Huneker (Promenades of An Impressionist - Charles Scribner's Sons - New York, 1910 p. 8)
Frederick Lawton (The Art Journal - London Virtue - 1911 p. 57)
Charles Louis Borgmeyer (The Master Impressionists - The Fine Arts Press - Chicago, 1913 p. 134)
André Leclerc (Cézanne - Editions Hyperion - Paris, 1914 p. 11)
Gustave Coquiot (Paul Cézanne - Librairie Paul Ollendorrf - Paris 1914-19 pp. 87-88)
Ambroise Vollard (Paul Cézanne - Galerie A. Vollard - Paris, 1914. pp. 48, 50)
Ambroise Vollard (Paul Cezanne - GEORGES GRÈS & Cie - Zurich, 1919 p. 63)
Ambroise Vollard (Paul Cézanne; His Life and Art - Nicholas L. Brown - New York, 1923 pp. 67, 68)
Tristan L. Klingsor Cézanne. Paris: Rieder, 1923, p. 33 Georges Rivière – (Le Maitre Paul Cézanne - H. Floury - Paris, 1923 pp. 93, 210)
Georges Rivière (Cézanne le Peintre Solitaire - Librarie Floury - Paris, 1933 pp. 125, 133)
Gerstle Mack (Paul Cézanne - Alfred A. Knopf - New York, 1935 pp. 271, 272)
Lionello Venturi (Cézanne Son Art — Son Oeuvre - P. Rosenberg - Paris, 1936 p. 72)
John Rewald (Cézanne - Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Son Amitie Pour Zola - Albin Michel - Paris, 1939 pp. 270-271)
John Rewald (The History of Impressionism - Museum of Modern Art - New York - 1946 p. 365)
John Rewald (Paul Cézanne A Biography - Simon and Schuster - New York, 1948 p. 133)
John Rewald (Paul Cézanne - Spring Books - London, 1948 pp. 115, 116, 191)
John Rewald (The Ordeal of Paul Cezanne - Phoenix House 1950 p. 106-107)
Lawrence Hanson (Mortal Victory: A Biography of Paul Cézanne – 1960)
John Rewald (The History of Impressionism - Museum of Modern Art - New York, 1961)
Richard W. Murphy (The World of Cézanne - Time-Life Books - New York, 1968 p.63)
John Rewald (Paul Cézanne, A Biography - Shocken Books - New York 1968)
Jack Lindsay (Paul Cézanne, His Life and Art - New York Graphic Society, 1969)
John Rewald (Cézanne and His Father - Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 4 1971-1972)
Dr. Richard Shiff (Cézanne and the End of Impressionism - University of Chicago Press - Chicago, 1984 p. 281)
John Rewald (Cézanne, a Biography - H.N. Abrams - New York, 1986)
John Rewald (Studies in Impressionism - H.N. Abrams - New York - 1986 p. 99)
Sir Lawrence Gowing (Cézanne: The Early Years 1859 - 1872 - Harry N. Abrams - New York, 1988)
John Rewald (The Paintings of Paul Cezanne; A Catalogue Raisonne London: Thames and Hudson, 1996)
Jayne Warman (Societe Paul Cezanne - A.J.F. Millar 2003)
Alaine Mothe (Societe Paul Cezanne - Timeline Entry May 1 1882)
