Le Jardinier Vallier (The artist's gardener, Vallier)

Le Jardinier Vallier (c.1906) in a New York collection is one of Cézanne's very last paintings — the gardener at his Les Lauves studio whom he painted repeatedly in his final months. Vallier, an elderly local man who maintained the garden and grounds of Les Lauves, sat for Cézanne with patient regularity in the final years, and the resulting series of portraits are among the most moving works of his career. Cézanne died in October 1906 after being caught in a rainstorm while painting outdoors, and the Vallier portraits document the last sustained engagement with figure painting before his death. The late handling is at its most transparent and open: bare canvas is visible, strokes of pure color float across the surface, the boundary between figure and garden dissolves. The Vallier portraits were among the works exhibited at the 1907 Salon d'Automne retrospective that so profoundly affected Picasso, Braque, and the generation that would create Cubism.

The late handling is transparent and open — bare canvas shows through in places, the figure built from overlapping directional strokes rather than solid coverage. The garden setting dissolves into loose color passages around the more carefully analyzed figure. A muted palette of greens, blues, and ochres gives the canvas a meditative quiet.