Description
Peasant in a Blue Smock – the canvas a museum bought in memory of its first director
The man sits turned slightly to one side, in a loose blue working smock, with a red neckerchief at the open collar and a soft brown hat on his head. His hands are held together low in front of him. Behind him stands a folding screen with a female figure in blue painted on it. This hand-painted painting on canvas reproduces Cézanne’s late work of about 1897, which measures 81.5 × 64.8 centimetres in the original and is held by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
The dedication that stands in the museum record
For this canvas the ownership line does not end with the name of the museum. It reads: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, dedicated to the memory of Richard F. Brown. Brown was the Kimbell’s first director; he had previously run the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and he worked with the architect Louis I. Kahn on the design of the museum building, held to be one of the finest museum buildings of the twentieth century. He died in November 1979. The following spring, on 13 May 1980, the museum bought this canvas at the sale of Henry Ford II’s collection and dedicated it to his memory. The record carries both dates, and the museum’s dedication is the third fact; the conclusion we leave to the reader.
The German year, 1912
In 1912 this canvas appeared in three German cities inside a single year, and each of them called it something different. In April and May it hung in Berlin at Paul Cassirer’s as number 8, as Sitzender Bauer, lent by Vollard – and Cassirer bought it out of that show. From 25 May to 30 September it was in Cologne at the great international exhibition of the Sonderbund as number 146, titled there Bauer mit rotem Halstuch, peasant with a red neckerchief. In the autumn of the same year the record places it in Barmen, in the Reber collection, with a query over the identification. Darmstadt and Berlin followed in 1913, where it was called Der Fuhrmann and Porträt eines Fuhrmanns, the carter, and Dresden in 1914.
Thirteen owners, and the day it went back to the dealer
The first known owner was Ambroise Vollard in Paris. On 25 June 1910 Auguste Pellerin bought it; on 30 June 1911 it passed to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune – and the same day back to Vollard, the dealer who had sold it. On 31 October 1912 Paul Cassirer took it in Berlin, then Gottlieb Friedrich Reber in Barmen, then Paul Rosenberg in Paris and New York, the collector A. Conger Goodyear, Mrs Mary G. Kenefick of Buffalo, and later Henry Ford II of Detroit. The same Auguste Pellerin appears in the Portrait of Gustave Geffroy and the Portrait of Antony Valabrègue.
Two salerooms
The canvas went through an auction room twice, and both times the record keeps the date and the number. First at Sotheby’s in London on 25 November 1959 as number 17, then at Christie’s in New York on 13 May 1980 as number 3, at the sale of Henry Ford II’s collection. It was at that second auction that the Kimbell bought it. The catalogue gives no hammer prices; the only sum recorded against this work is Vollard’s.
The screen, and the woman who is not in the room
There is no second person behind the seated man, however much it looks like it. At the upper right a female figure in blue appears with a yellow shape above her: she is painted on the folding screen standing behind him, and the catalogue lists exactly that screen among the furnishings. The pale vertical band at the left is the edge of it. What follows is that the canvas holds no depth of room but a patterned surface immediately behind his back: the blue of the smock meets the blue of the screen, and the figure separates from the ground almost only by the drawing of the hat and the shoulders.
What Vollard wrote in his book
In Vollard’s stockbook this canvas carries the number 3485, and beside it a short description in the dealer’s own shorthand: huile; paysan assis cravate rouge chapeau sur la tête – oil; seated peasant, red tie, hat on his head. Next to it stand the measurement 81 × 65 centimetres and the price of 200 francs. The description matches what is on the canvas, down to the details. In its people field the catalogue also gives the sitter’s name, père Alexandre, and his trade, labourer; nothing further about him is recorded in any source consulted, and we will not invent the rest.
The blue smock and the red neckerchief give the work a pair of colours that needs nothing in the room to hold it up – which is why it works well on a quiet wall, on its own. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 40 × 50 to 143 × 180 centimetres, intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher, and how it will look on the wall is shown in advance by our 3D application. From the same late years comes Young Italian Woman at a Table.
- Subject: Peasant in a Blue Smock, Paul Cézanne, about 1897, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: Vollard’s stockbook records 200 francs against number 3485, with a description that matches the painting down to the red neckerchief
