Description
Portrait of the Painter Achille Emperaire – the name written across the top
Right at the top of the canvas, in large gold-ochre capitals, stands the inscription: ACHILLE EMPERAIRE PEINTRE. Below it a man sits frontally and symmetrically in a tall armchair whose arched back rises well above his head, covered in a pale slipcover scattered with small russet flowers. He wears a long blue dressing gown, open over a red-orange garment; his head is large, the dark hair combed back from a high forehead, with a moustache and a short beard. His hands lie along the arms of the chair, the fingers long and thin. His legs are bare and pale, his feet in dark slippers over white stockings, resting on a low wooden stool. The ground is almost black at the sides and above. The original measures 200 × 122 cm, was made in 1867 and 1868 and is held by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Here the painter’s hand takes it over: a hand-painted painting on canvas, oil on canvas.
The inscription in capitals
The catalogue raisonné gives this inscription word for word, among the canvas’s own particulars: the work is signed at the lower right and carries at the top the words ACHILLE EMPERAIRE PEINTRE. The work therefore says for itself who is shown on it – and what he was. The names of the other sitters live in the catalogue; this one is painted into the canvas.
The titles the work has carried
For this canvas the catalogue also lists other titles under which it has appeared, and two of them speak not of a trade but of health: “L’Homme infirme” and “Le Malade”. The inscription the painter himself put on the work says something else: peintre, painter. Achille Emperaire was an acquaintance of Cézanne’s from Aix and a painter himself. What the painter meant by it the catalogue does not say, and we will not guess at it either – but both things are on record.
Two metres of canvas
The canvas is two metres high and a good 120 centimetres wide, a portrait at life size. The chair is set up so that the figure looks small within it – the back arches above his head, and his feet just reach the stool. The floral slipcover is the only pattern in the work and the only light field beside the blue gown. Because the canvas is so narrow and tall, our smallest size begins at 42 × 70 cm and the largest measures 107 × 180 cm.
The work is severe in colour – blue, red, white and blackness – and it is exactly this that makes it read on a tall, narrow wall, beside a door or on a staircase, where it gets the height it needs. Intermediate measurements we stretch to custom size on the stretcher frame, and how it will look framed is shown by our 3D rendering application. From the same early years comes The Stove in the Studio, and from the same Paris collection Woman with a Coffeepot and Self-Portrait with a Pink Background.
- Subject: Portrait of the Painter Achille Emperaire, Paul Cézanne, 1867-1868, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
- Technique: hand-painted painting, oil on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 15 dimensions, custom size on request
- Of note: the sitter’s name and trade are painted across the top of the canvas in capitals
