Man with a Pipe

A farmworker from Paul Cézanne’s family estate posed for this painting. He also appeared as a card player wearing the same hat and smoking a clay pipe in another of the artist works, The Card Players (also on display at The Courtauld Gallery). It was unusual at the time for a rural labourer to be made the subject of a portrait, but it was typical of Cézanne to defy convention and paint what interested him most. The sitter’s name, however, is not recorded so the man remains anonymous.

Cézanne seems to have carefully considered every brushstroke in order to breathe life into the limited tonal range of browns that comprise the man’s clothes and background. This is achieved with a wide range of lively, short brushstrokes that subtly animate the picture. The man is portrayed as a stoical figure, his weathered face suggesting a working life spent outdoors. Cézanne made a number of paintings of rural workers at the time. He wrote, ‘I love above all the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs’.