Louis-Auguste Cézanne, père de l'artiste (The Painter's Father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne)

This large 1865 portrait of Cézanne's father Louis-Auguste, now in the National Gallery London, is one of his most ambitious early figure works. Louis-Auguste Cézanne — a prosperous hat-maker turned banker — is shown reading a newspaper, a pose that captures the bourgeois domestic ritual of the period. The elder Cézanne was a dominating presence in his son's life: it was his money that funded Paul's art studies and kept him financially independent until middle age. This large formal portrait, painted in their Jas de Bouffan home, has the air of a young artist demonstrating ambition to a father skeptical of his chosen career. The scale and seriousness of the work are noteworthy for a twenty-six-year-old.

The large format demands compositional ambition, and Cézanne responds with a strong figure-in-interior arrangement. The father reads in a high-backed chair, the newspaper held before him, his body in three-quarter profile. The paint is applied with the heavy, urgently worked surfaces of his early period, dark tonalities predominating.