Jeune Fille au piano (Girl at the Piano - The Overture to Tannhauser)

Painted around 1868-1869 and now in the Hermitage, this domestic scene of a girl at the piano — playing the overture to Wagner's Tannhäuser — is one of Cézanne's most refined early figure compositions. Wagner was fashionable among the Parisian avant-garde of the period, and the choice of the Tannhäuser overture places the painting in a specifically contemporary cultural context. Two women are shown — one playing, one listening with needlework in hand — in an arrangement that recalls Vermeer's domestic interiors. The work shows Cézanne capable of a refined, controlled figure painting at odds with the turbulent canvases of his Romantic-influenced early period.

The composition is unusually refined and restrained for the young Cézanne — the palette is carefully controlled, the figures well-observed. The piano's dark mass anchors the left side while the two figures create an intimate triangular arrangement. The handling is tighter than his more impetuous early works, showing genuine formal discipline.