Boy With a Straw Hat

Boy with a Straw Hat (c.1896) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art captures a young model in outdoor summer dress — the wide-brimmed straw hat suggesting the practical headgear of Provençal summer. By 1896 Cézanne was using models from his immediate Aix-en-Provence environment for figure studies that served as working exercises between the major portrait campaigns of his Hortense series and the Card Players. The straw hat provides a strong formal element: its brim creates a distinctive horizontal that interacts with the face beneath, adding compositional interest to what would otherwise be a straightforward bust portrait. LACMA's collection of this work reflects the museum's broad coverage of French Post-Impressionist painting, and the straw hat portrait demonstrates Cézanne's consistent formal approach to informal figure subjects. The same directional brushwork and color modulation that builds the face also constructs the hat's texture, unified by his systematic approach to all surface qualities.

Cézanne built surfaces through parallel, directional 'constructive' brushstrokes that model form and recession simultaneously. His palette of muted greens, ochres, and blue-greys is applied in overlapping planes that create a sense of solidity without conventional shading.