Description
Boy with Skull – youth set against mortality
A young man sits at a table, resting his head on his hand and looking past us; books and a human skull lie in front of him. The canvas is held by the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania. Our hand-painted reproduction on canvas brings this pensive, serious subject into your home, painted in oil on canvas.
An old subject in a new manner
A youth with a skull is a classic vanitas subject – a reminder of mortality that painters had used for centuries. Cézanne took it seriously but painted it without symbolic drama: no candle, no hourglass, no inscription. What remains is only youth and a quiet, almost dull room.
Skulls in the studio
In his late years Cézanne painted skulls repeatedly, including in pure still lifes. In his studio at Aix they were part of the permanent furniture. Biographers connect this with his growing solitude and his awareness of an approaching end; that is an interpretation, not a statement by the painter.
What you see on the canvas
Behind the young man hangs a heavy patterned drape taking up almost the whole left half of the scene. The table tilts towards the viewer, so that the books and the skull slide forward. The original is painted in oil on canvas and measures 130.2 × 97.3 cm – an upright format, considerably larger than life size.
A collection that was never to be moved
The canvas is held by the Barnes Foundation, established by the American physician and inventor Albert C. Barnes. In its founding charter he laid down exactly how the paintings were to hang and forbade both rearranging and lending them. In 2004 a court in Montgomery County set those provisions aside, and in 2012, after years of litigation and public protest, the whole collection moved from Merion into a new building in central Philadelphia. The arrangement of the paintings on the walls was precisely recreated in the new building – exactly as you see it around this work.
A composed portrait for a work space
Every copy we paint by hand in oil on canvas – not a print but a genuine hand-painted work of art. It is available in ten sizes, and for one particular wall we will paint it to your measurements. The upright format and dark scale look composed above a desk. We show you the frame in a realistic 3D preview. Among our hand-painted oil reproductions you will find Cézanne’s other portraits and figures: Boy in a Red Waistcoat, Girl at the Piano (The Overture to Tannhäuser) and Still Life with Plaster Cast.
- Subject: Boy with Skull, Paul Cézanne, 1896–1898, Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania
- 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: a classic vanitas subject painted without its usual symbols – only youth and the skull remain
