It has been confirmed that the gallery will present Cézanne Portraits from the 26th October 2017 until the 11th February 2018.
During his career, Paul Cezanne painted almost 200 portraits during his career, including 26 of himself and 29 of his wife, Hortense Fiquet. Now the National Portrait Gallery will display over fifty of them in a new display, featuring works that have never been on display in the UK before.
Portraits which have never been publicly displayed include the artist’s arresting Self Portrait in a Bowler Hat (1885-6) on loan from the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek gallery in Copenhagen. Also on UK display for the first time since the 1930s will be Boy in a Red Waistcoat (1888-90), one of a series of paintings of a young man in Italian clothes identified as Michelangelo de Rosa, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair (1888-90) on loan from The Art Institute of Chicago, last exhibited in London in 1936 and 1939 respectively.
Considered to be one of the most influential artists of the 19th century, Paul Cezanne is generally categorised as a Post-Impressionist, but this exhibition is an opportunity to re-evaluate his place in the art world.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘ Up until now, Cezanne’s portraiture has received surprisingly little attention, so we are thrilled to be able to bring together so many of his portraits for the first time to reveal arguably the most personal, and therefore most human, aspect of Cézanne’s art.’
The exhibition is curated by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he has organised numerous exhibitions, including major retrospectives devoted to Willem de Kooning, Henri Matisse, and Kurt Schwitters; with Mary Morton,Curator and Head of Department, French Paintings, National Gallery of Art and Xavier Rey, Director of Collections, Musée d’Orsay.
Cezanne Portraits will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery from the 26th October 2017 until the 11th February 2017. For more information visit: http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2016/cezanne-portraits.php.