The Smoker (Hermitage)

A man sits close to the picture plane, his cheek supported by one hand and a short pipe held between his lips. His other hand rests low, near the bottom edge. Behind him, a dark bottle and fruit seem to occupy the room, yet they belong to another Cézanne painting set against the wall. The portrait makes this small uncertainty—where the man ends and the painted things around him begin—part of the experience of looking.

The catalogue calls it Le Fumeur accoudé (FWN 506), c. 1891; the Hermitage dates it 1890–92. ^{[1] [2]}

A seated figure that fills the canvas

The man is nearly as wide as the available space. His hat presses against the pale horizontal band behind it; his right shoulder pushes toward the ochre area at the edge. The body makes a broad diagonal from the propped elbow at left through the chest to the sleeve descending on the right. Even the pipe continues a slant, sending the eye back toward the face. These lines give the pose a firmness that a simple description—someone taking a break—would miss.

Look at how little of the chair or floor is available to establish his position. The large brown surface at lower left offers a support for the elbow, but its front slopes and changes colour without a tidy contour. His low hand has a pale, heavily marked back; it is one of the brightest passages in the lower half. The picture gives the sitter an impressive physical presence while leaving the arrangement of furniture oddly compressed.

The face is built from contrasting patches rather than smoothed flesh. A reddish ear answers a red cheek, while muted blue-grey passages collect beneath the eye and around the jaw. The dark moustache, pipe and hat brim gather around the centre of attention, but they do not turn the face into an easily readable expression. One can see the weight of the head on the hand and the alert eyes without claiming to know what the man is thinking.

A portrait surrounded by paintings

The catalogue identifies two background canvases: Pots, bouteille, tasse et fruits (1867–69) and Baigneurs en plein air (c. 1890–91). ^[1]

The first confusion is spatial. The black bottle stands upright as emphatically as the sitter’s pipe stem points outward. Fruit overlaps the dark opening by the elbow. Yet a thin boundary above the bottle declares that this is painted space inside painted space. The sitter’s arm appears to cut in front of it, but the eye has already granted those objects the same reality as his sleeve. A still life has been made to share the portrait’s room without occupying it in the usual way.

The upper painting works differently. Its pale blue and green area is interrupted by the top edge of the portrait, so that only a slice is visible. The broad ochre shape at right descends toward the man’s shoulder and makes the studio feel close around him. Together, the cropped canvases prevent the setting from behaving like a neutral backdrop. The eye moves from person to still life to picture edge, then back again, continually testing which plane is nearest.

Theodore Reff argued that the older still life appears to rest on the table in front of it. He understood this as part of Cézanne’s recurring use of pictures within pictures in the 1890s. ^[4]

Colour makes the encounter more than a visual puzzle. Warm orange and yellow collect in the table, the right-hand plane and the sitter’s skin. The coat is a cooler, broken blue, crossed by small warm marks rather than filled as a single dark block. From a distance the figure remains cohesive; near the surface, short strokes let the room and the jacket share a way of being painted. His human scale is unmistakable, but no part of the picture is exempt from the same slow construction.

A worker, a model, and a recurring pose

Michel Fraisset identifies the Hermitage sitter as Paulin Paulet, a gardener at the Jas de Bouffan. He separates Paulet from père Alexandre and traces a confusion of names in earlier accounts. ^[3]

The portrait records a particular build, face and moustache, while the hat, coat and pipe establish an everyday presence. Cézanne gives little anecdotal detail about an individual day or job. The carefully held pose makes us conscious of a person also serving as a model.

John Elderfield points out how a farmworker painted individually could reappear in a Card Players composition. He situates that exchange within Cézanne’s sustained practice of painting sitters he knew. ^[5]

Fraisset links Paulet to the related Mannheim Smoker and to a watercolour of the leaning man. ^[3]

The comparison helps us see the elbow as a hinge. Here it anchors one large body to the tabletop; in a group, poised arms help make the compact space between players. The same bodily structure can serve a quite different composition.

The paintings also differ in what they ask us to watch. A card game directs attention toward hands, cards and the relation between people. In this canvas the hands are separated, and no other person is present. The close crop lets the sitter’s weight, the edge of the table and the surrounding canvases carry the tension. The pipe is conspicuous, but no curling smoke turns it into a narrative of reverie. It is a small object held by a person whose body is doing most of the pictorial work.

Satish Padiyar connects this Smoker with Cézanne’s bathers and card players through its cropped background canvases, interpreting the linked motifs as an exploration of male solidarity and desire. ^[6]

Which smoker, and when?

Several Cézanne paintings carry similar English titles. The Pushkin Museum’s FWN 507 has a different background and Shchukin provenance; the Courtauld’s FWN 504 is another distinct pipe portrait. ^{[7] [3]}

The catalogue’s c. 1891 date differs from earlier scholars’ later datings; it also records an “1890” annotation by Cézanne’s son on a Vollard photograph. The Hermitage gives 1890–92. ^{[1] [2]}

From Paris to St Petersburg

The painting passed from dealer Vollard to Ivan Morozov by October 1909. For its Hermitage entry, the catalogue gives 1948 and the museum gives 1931. ^{[1] [2]}

It appeared in the 1904 Salon d’Automne; a 1973 exhibition dated it 1896–98. ^[1]