Say “Paul Cézanne,” and we think of landscape and still life paintings, images of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and apples on rucked-up tablecloths. The many repetitions and variations of these motifs affirm their lifelong resonance for their author, prompting some art historians, notably Meyer Schapiro, to speculate on why these subjects reverberated so continuously for Cézanne and to find clues to emotional connections in his drawings and schoolboy writings. Others have maintained that the essential neutrality of landscape forms and still life objects allowed the famously unsociable artist to concentrate on relationships of tonality, hue, and form without having to deal with personalities. Yet Cézanne, despite his reported discomfort with people other than close friends and family, was also a lifelong painter of figures, from early narrative paintings, to the many small groups of bathers, culminating in the last years of his life with the three triumphant large canvases of bathers now in the Tate, the Barnes Foundation, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Cézanne’s bathers, however, rarely suggest that he had nude models posing for him in the studio; some figures appear to be informed by drawings he did during his brief period of formal study, while others have been connected with photographs.

Cézanne’s bathers rarely suggest that he had nude models posing for him in the studio.

What is more surprising, given the many stories of Cézanne’s dislike of being watched while at work, is that he was also a painter of portraits, an undertaking that not