I have always thought I’d have recognized Ambroise Vollard immediately if I’d encountered him on the streets of early twentieth-century Paris. The legendary art dealer and publisher’s high, domed forehead, his pug nose, his neatly trimmed beard, and his beefy physique are all completely familiar from the many portraits made by the artists with whom he worked. Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Raoul Dufy, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Felix Vallaton all made images of Vollard, often more than once. Collectively, these works not only determine our conception of this vital player in the French vanguard a century ago, but also influence our understanding of just what that vanguard was concerned with.

Portraits of Vollard act as notes of emphasis in the wonderful exhibition, “Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde,” at the Metropolitan Museum until early January.[1]They provide a kind of crash course in the history of modernism, beginning with Cézanne’s truculent, brooding image (1899, Musée de Petit Palais, Paris) of the dealer who made his reputation. The painting signals early modernism’s translation of perceptions into a new language of touch and structure, feeling and form. Cézanne’s personal blend of anxiety, assurance, and single-mindedness is palpable in this tense, introspective picture. Vollard is perfectly recognizable—balding, pug-nosed, bearded—but his identity and even the fact that the subject of the painting is a figure, much less a specific person, seem no more or less significant than the fabric of broad, stabbing strokes out of which the