Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (born 1817), the Artist's Uncle
In the autumn of 1866, Cézanne undertook a series of paintings of his maternal uncle, Dominique Aubert, in different costumes. Here, he dons a robe and tasseled blue cap. In another work in The Met’s collection, he poses as a monk (1993.400.1). A friend reported: "Every day there appears a [new] portrait of him." Cézanne applied his paint directly with a palette knife on the coarsely woven canvas, giving these pictures what he called a "gutsy" character.
Artwork Details
- Title: Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (born 1817), the Artist's Uncle
- Artist: Paul Cézanne (French, Aix-en-Provence 1839–1906 Aix-en-Provence)
- Date: 1866
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 32 1/4 × 25 7/8 in. (81.9 × 65.7 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: Wolfe Fund, 1951; acquired from The Museum of Modern Art, Lillie P. Bliss Collection
- Object Number: 53.140.1
- Curatorial Department: European Paintings
Audio
6322. Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (born 1817), the Artist's Uncle
NARRATOR—In the autumn of 1866, the 27-year-old Cézanne undertook one of his most extraordinary projects--a series of nine portraits of his maternal uncle Dominique Aubert. In several of these depictions, Dominique, who was a bailiff by profession, is shown wearing fanciful costume. Here, he sports the kind of soft tasseled cap worn by local peasants.This element of play-acting suggests that Cézanne was more interested in using his image to investigate a set of purely pictorial concerns than he was in plumbing the depths of Dominique’s
personality. Using a palette knife, Cézanne piledhis colors onto the surface of the canvas, creating a thick, crusty layer of pigment that amounts to a kind of low relief in paint. The degree of willful defiance of artistic convention displayed in this extraordinary painting is formidable.
A second portrait of Uncle Dominique, also from 1866, is in the Annenberg collection and frequently on view in an adjacent gallery of the Museum.
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