{"id":84269,"date":"2021-09-02T18:12:25","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T16:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/uncategorized\/boy-in-a-red-waistcoat\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T12:49:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T10:49:23","slug":"boy-in-a-red-waistcoat","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/svetslik.si\/en\/paul-cezanne\/boy-in-a-red-waistcoat\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul C\u00e9zanne \u2013 Boy in a Red Waistcoat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boy in a Red Waistcoat \u2013 C\u00e9zanne\u2019s best known portrait of a young man<\/h2>\n

Boy in a Red Waistcoat is one of C\u00e9zanne\u2019s most popular portraits and the only subject he repeated four times in oil. The model was a young Italian who sat for C\u00e9zanne 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.<\/p>\n

Four oil versions of one model<\/h3>\n

C\u00e9zanne 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 B\u00fchrle collection in Zurich.<\/p>\n

Why this portrait differs from a bourgeois portrait<\/h3>\n

C\u00e9zanne 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

What you see on the canvas<\/h3>\n

The original is painted in oil on canvas, measures 89.5 \u00d7 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\u2019s fiftieth anniversary. Older sources still list the work as part of the private Mellon collection; that information has been out of date since 1995.<\/p>\n

The theft that struck another version<\/h3>\n

One of the most notorious art thefts of this century is connected with the subject of the boy in the red waistcoat \u2013 though not with this painting. In February 2008 three armed men broke into the E. G. B\u00fchrle 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 B\u00fchrle collection itself is the subject of debate over the origin of its founder\u2019s fortune, made as an arms dealer during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

A portrait that holds up close to<\/h3>\n

This portrait lives on how the paint is laid down \u2013 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<\/strong> you will find C\u00e9zanne\u2019s other portraits as well: Boy with Skull<\/a>, Girl at the Piano (The Overture to Tannh\u00e4user)<\/a> and The Card Players (Metropolitan)<\/a>.<\/p>\n