Portrait of Gustave Geffroy

~In 1895, Cézanne began and worked on, but did not finish, a portrait of the Impressionist critic Gustave Geffroy (fig. 48), whom he had met at Claude Monet’s house in Giverny. Fifty years later, in his essay titled “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote one short sentence, and a couple of...

~The two concluding chapters turn their attention to the avant-garde, to look at painters – Degas and Monet, Seurat and Cézanne, Signac and Denis – who might be expected to dominate a book on French painting between 1880 and 1900. After all, such artists paved the way for important innovations in the early twentieth century. They are major figures...

Unlike family members or sympathetic fellow artists, all with ready-made allegiances, portrait sitters with a more detached professional or social relationship to the artist implicitly make greater demands for themselves. This challenge to his autonomy was felt acutely by Matisse. In the transaction of portraits with...