chocquet: PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS?
In Paris, in 1875, lived a customs inspector named Victor Chocquet. His great passion was art. He fed this passion at Le Café Guerbois, 9, avenue de Clichy, Montmartre, which was also frequented by young artists. From his meagre savings, Chocquet spent as much as he could to buy their canvasses. During that year, Chocquet’s portrait was painted separately by two of his friends, Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
If we were not told, we would not recognize these portraits as being of the same man, and certainly not during the same year. The dissimilarity is remarkable. If it is true that an artist paints what he sees, then these two portraits open questions about perception on all levels.
Renoir portrays Chocquet as a distinguished gentleman, his thick white hair carefully brushed back over his high forehead. He faces us with an open, pleasant countenance. His beige suit is neat if perhaps well-worn. The portrait overflows with the light which is Renoir’s hallmark. Chocquet’s eyes, in particular, are luminous and beautiful. His skin is evenly coloured. The lines of the painting are smooth and rounded; the composition is one of harmony. Based on this portrait, I would characterize Chocquet as a pleasant old gentleman, possibly one with many memories worth hearing.
Cézanne’s portrait of Chocquet (painted in the same year, remember) is of a man in his forties. Chocquet does not face us nor does he seem aware of the presence of anyone. His thick, black, unruly hair has been swept back from the forehead, apparently by worried hands. The skin on his face has red patches. His deeply hooded eyes gaze morosely and somewhat blankly to the right. The portrait is one of discordant angles. Its colors are deep and moody. Chocquet’s shirt, seen only at the neckline, is open and, along with the tousled hair, gives him a dishevelled appearance. The overall impact is discordant. My impression of Chocquet from Cézanne’s portrait is that of a preoccupied and deeply troubled man.
These two portraits, of the same man in the same year, show two completely different men. Only a painstaking comparison of details, such as the natural curl of the hair, the shape of the eyebrows, and the lines on the forehead, forces me to agree that both portray the same man. How can we account for the radical difference in these portraits?
how much of any portrait
is a portrait of the artist?
An old adage states that a painter paints what he sees. Did Renoir see this world in the light that we admire in his paintings? Perhaps he really saw people, skies, and landscapes with a soft-edged glow. For Cézanne, something very different might have been true. Did Cézanne see a jagged world capable of being rendered only by square brush strokes? I suspect that the answer lies in the issue of perception, which includes not only sensory data but psychological and emotional input as well. Surely, the beauty, soft smiles and luminescence of Renoir’s work tells us more about him than it does of his subjects.
Equally, Cézanne’s portrait might show us as much of Cézanne’s anxieties as it does of Chocquet. It would be an injustice to Renoir and Cézanne, who certainly knew what they were about, to conjecture that either of them could not render an accurate physical portrait. In some sense, both of these portraits, painted as they were by masters, must be a realistic rendering of Chocquet. I believe that Renoir and Cézanne, in painting their friend, expressed themselves freely and without the inhibition of seeking the approval of the sitter.
We might also consider the different personalities of the artists. Renoir was a genial man, not much given to negativity, whose perception of Chocquet may have been touched by his own optimism. Cézanne was another type of man; an anxious man, a depressed man. Later in life, he became completely isolated and feared people, with the sole exception of Monet. A trace of this anxiety appears in his portrait of Chocquet.
The questions raised by the differences in the portraits of Chocquet painted by Renoir and by Cézanne bring up a morass of unknowns. Do we ordinary mortals partake of the same cocktail of perception as the great masters? I believe we do. We have no ability to see exactly what others see – unless they happen to be great masters, able to set down their perceptions on canvas.
We might also consider the different personalities of the artists. Renoir was a genial man, not much given to negativity, whose perception of Chocquet may have been touched by his own optimism. Cézanne was another type of man; an anxious man, a depressed man. Later in life, he became completely isolated and feared people, with the sole exception of Monet. A trace of this anxiety appears in his portrait of Chocquet.
The questions raised by the differences in the portraits of Chocquet painted by Renoir and by Cézanne bring up a morass of unknowns. Do we ordinary mortals partake of the same cocktail of perception as the great masters? I believe we do. We have no ability to see exactly what others see – unless they happen to be great masters, able to set down their perceptions on canvas.
© Chris McDonough 2003