The Artist's Son in the Red Chair

The Artist's Son in the Red Chair, painted around 1880 and now in Paris's Musée de l'Orangerie, depicts Paul Cézanne fils — the painter's son by Hortense Fiquet — as a child in a domestic interior. Cézanne painted his son repeatedly through the child's early years, the familiar figure offering an available model for compositional experiments in portraiture. By 1880 Cézanne had withdrawn increasingly from Paris to Aix-en-Provence, working in relative isolation and developing the analytical approach to form and color that would influence Cubism and all subsequent Western painting. Portraits of his son belong to the intimate domestic subjects — wife, son, card players, bathers — that absorbed him alongside his landscape and still-life work.

Oil on canvas with Cézanne's characteristic parallel brushstroke construction — short, methodical strokes building up the figure's volume by describing planes rather than following contours. The red chair provides a bold color anchor; the child's features are observed with the same detached analytical attention Cézanne applied to apples and mountains.