{"id":182387,"date":"2026-08-09T14:43:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T12:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/?post_type=product&p=182387"},"modified":"2026-08-09T14:43:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T12:43:52","slug":"portrait-of-antony-valabregue","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-cezanne\/portrait-of-antony-valabregue\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul C\u00e9zanne \u2013 Portrait of Antony Valabr\u00e8gue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Portrait of Antony Valabr\u00e8gue \u2013 the canvas an auction brought into a museum<\/h2>\n

The man sits close in front of a grey-green wall laid on in broad, plainly visible strokes. He has dark hair and a full reddish-brown beard, and he wears a black coat, a grey waistcoat with three buttons showing, a white upright collar and a black bow tie loosely knotted. Nothing else is there: no furniture, no book, no table. This hand-painted painting on canvas<\/strong> reproduces C\u00e9zanne\u2019s early work of 1869 to 1870, which measures 60 \u00d7 50.2 centimetres in the original and is held by the J. Paul Getty Museum<\/strong> in Los Angeles under the inventory number 85.PA.45.<\/p>\n

The auction that moved it from private hands into public ones<\/h3>\n

For a century this canvas passed from one private owner to the next, and could be seen only when somebody lent it to an exhibition. That ended on 22 October 1982, when it sold at Sotheby\u2019s<\/strong> in New York as lot 21 of the Andr\u00e9 Meyer collection sale. The Galerie Beyeler in Basel bought it, and in 1985 the Getty acquired it. It has hung since then in a building open to anyone \u2013 which is the moment the work stopped being something people were lent and became something people visit.<\/p>\n

Who Antony Valabr\u00e8gue was<\/h3>\n

Antony Valabr\u00e8gue (1844\u20131900) was a French poet and critic, born in Aix \u2013 the same town as C\u00e9zanne, \u00c9mile Zola and Baptistin Baille. He studied in Paris and settled there from the middle of the 1860s. In the capital he belonged to the circle of Proven\u00e7als gathered around Zola and C\u00e9zanne, and the portrait comes out of that friendship: the painter was not painting a client but an acquaintance from his own town.<\/p>\n

A name the record once hedged on<\/h3>\n

The catalogue raisonn\u00e9 lists seven further titles under which this canvas has appeared, and two of them are telling. One is simply Portrait d\u2019homme<\/em>, Portrait of a Man, with no name at all. The other is Portrait pr\u00e9sum\u00e9 d\u2019Antony Valabr\u00e8gue<\/em> \u2013 the presumed portrait of Antony Valabr\u00e8gue. It was under that second title that the work was shown in 1936 at the Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Orangerie in Paris as number 17. Today the catalogue heads it with the sitter\u2019s name and no qualifier. Who settled the doubt, and when, the record does not say, and we will not supply what is missing from it.<\/p>\n

A portrait with nothing in it but the man<\/h3>\n

It is the absence of objects that gives this canvas its character. The ground is not smooth but built from short flat loadings of grey-green that visibly cross one another; the same hand built the face, out of separate patches of pink, cream and grey meeting without soft transitions. The paint stands thick, almost as though set with a blade. The man\u2019s gaze does not go straight out at the viewer but slips a little to one side. Because there is no table, no window and no book, the head has to carry everything on its own \u2013 and that is why this is one of those early canvases in which you can already see where the painter went later.<\/p>\n

Nine owners in four countries<\/h3>\n

The first known owner was the dealer Ambroise Vollard<\/strong> in Paris. The canvas then went to Count Armand Doria at the Ch\u00e2teau d\u2019Orrouy, next to the collector Auguste Pellerin, and from him to his son Jean-Victor Pellerin. There followed the Wildenstein galleries in Paris and New York, then the New York banker Andr\u00e9 Meyer, after the 1982 sale the Galerie Beyeler in Basel, and finally the Getty. The same Auguste Pellerin appears in the history of the Portrait of Gustave Geffroy<\/a> \u2013 a collector who was buying C\u00e9zanne when few people were.<\/p>\n

From Berlin in 1904 to the Grand Palais<\/h3>\n

The canvas was first exhibited in 1904 at Paul Cassirer\u2019s in Berlin, in the Sonderausstellung Paul C\u00e9zanne<\/em>, from 22 April to 15 June. In 1913 it was in Stuttgart as number 330, lent by Count Doria from his ch\u00e2teau in the Oise. Brussels followed in 1935, London in 1939 at Wildenstein, and Washington in 1962, when the National Gallery of Art showed the collection of Mr and Mrs Andr\u00e9 Meyer. In 1988 the work was at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for C\u00e9zanne: The Early Years 1859\u20131872<\/em> as number 56, travelling from there to the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay and to Washington; in 1995 it was at the Grand Palais as number 8.<\/p>\n

For a home it is an obliging format: a portrait with no narrative in it, which holds its own beside a bookcase or in a working corner, where it competes with no other subject. We paint it in fifteen sizes, from 42 \u00d7 50 to 149 \u00d7 180 centimetres, and intermediate measurements we stretch on a made-to-measure stretcher; how it will look on your wall is shown by our 3D application<\/strong>. From the same early years come the Portrait of the Painter Achille Emperaire<\/a> and The Stove in the Studio<\/a>.<\/p>\n