Description
Boy in a Red Waistcoat – Cézanne’s best known portrait of a young man
Boy in a Red Waistcoat is one of Cézanne’s most popular portraits and the only subject he repeated four times in oil. The model was a young Italian who sat for Cézanne in his Paris studio; the sources name him as Michelangelo di Rosa. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this calm, faintly pensive portrait into your home, painted in oil on canvas with the red waistcoat as the warm centre of the scene.
Four oil versions of one model
Cézanne painted the same boy in the red waistcoat four times in oil and portrayed him twice more in watercolour. The versions differ in pose: in one the boy leans on the table with his elbow and props up his head, in another he sits frontally, and in this one he stands by a chair back with his right arm at his side. The canvases are scattered today: besides the Washington picture they are held by the Barnes Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Bührle collection in Zurich.
Why this portrait differs from a bourgeois portrait
Cézanne does not flatter the boy or assign him a role. He is neither shepherd nor prince; the arm is too long, the shoulders are slightly displaced, and the background is divided into large planes of bluish curtain and pale wall. It is exactly this uncorrected, slowly built image that gave the portrait its modern seriousness – the painter set colour down like a brick, not like a description. The red waistcoat is not an ornament but the load-bearing colour around which the whole scene finds its balance.
What you see on the canvas
The original is painted in oil on canvas, measures 89.5 × 72.4 cm and was made between 1888 and 1890. It is held today by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; it entered the collection in 1995 as a gift from the collection of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon on the gallery’s fiftieth anniversary. Older sources still list the work as part of the private Mellon collection; that information has been out of date since 1995.
The theft that struck another version
One of the most notorious art thefts of this century is connected with the subject of the boy in the red waistcoat – though not with this painting. In February 2008 three armed men broke into the E. G. Bührle collection in Zurich shortly before closing and carried off four canvases, among them the Zurich version of Boy in a Red Waistcoat. Serbian police found it in Belgrade in 2012, hidden in the roof lining of a car. The Washington version you see here was not caught up in that story; the Bührle collection itself is the subject of debate over the origin of its founder’s fortune, made as an arms dealer during the Second World War.
A portrait that holds up close to
This portrait lives on how the paint is laid down – which is why we paint it by hand, with a brush, and never print it. You can choose among ten sizes, and we will paint it to your measurements if you prefer. The upright format works well in a hallway or beside a staircase, especially paired with a second portrait. You can view the frame in a realistic 3D preview in our app before you order. Among our reproductions on canvas you will find Cézanne’s other portraits as well: Boy with Skull, Girl at the Piano (The Overture to Tannhäuser) and The Card Players (Metropolitan).
- Subject: Boy in a Red Waistcoat, Paul Cézanne, 1888–1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 10 formats, stretched on a wooden stretcher frame on request, or made to your measurements
- Fact: the same model in the red waistcoat appears in four of Cézanne’s oil paintings
