Man with a Straw Hat (Gustave Boyer)

A yellow straw hat takes command of this narrow portrait. Its brim runs almost from edge to edge; beneath it, a man turns his head towards us without fully facing us. The dark hair and coat make the illuminated face feel still more exposed.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies the sitter as Gustave Boyer, a childhood friend of Cézanne who later worked as a lawyer, and dates the picture 1870–71. Earlier writers sometimes took Boyer for Cézanne himself. ^[1]

A head held between light and dark

The crown of the hat is a broad, irregular block of ochre and yellow. Its left edge rounds down, while the right side seems to fall away in a flatter, darker brim. Cézanne does not give every part the same crisp outline. The upper crown sinks into the charcoal background at its right edge; the underside of the brim opens into a pocket of near black behind Boyer’s ear. The hat therefore feels substantial and slightly unstable at once, as if the light were shaping it while the surrounding darkness pressed against it.

Below that wide horizontal shape, the head takes a different route. Boyer’s forehead angles toward the bridge of his nose; his cheek and jaw change direction in smaller steps. One eye meets the viewer more clearly than the other. On the picture’s right, the face passes into shadow, and the dark hair and beard absorb its edge. The portrait holds a striking imbalance: a massive hat above a face whose exact contour is repeatedly adjusted rather than simply traced.

The ear, on the left, is a small patch of warm red enclosed by dark hair. Nearby ochre strokes run down into the side of the beard. The visible eye has a dark centre inside a ring of warmer and cooler marks. These details make the face readable from a distance, yet close inspection breaks its apparent smoothness into separate decisions. Nothing about the handling suggests a polished, even skin surface. Areas of flesh seem to have been worked toward a resemblance through changes in value and direction.

The mouth is especially compressed. A pale stroke catches the upper lip, a reddish mark touches the lower one, and dark paint gathers around both. The rounded chin below is modelled more broadly. Boyer’s expression can shift with the viewer’s attention: the direct eye holds us, while the mouth resists an easy account of what he might be feeling. That uncertainty belongs to the visible arrangement of marks. It is more interesting than supplying a mood the picture cannot prove.

The coat, ground and moving outline

Boyer’s coat occupies much of the lower half of the image, but it offers few descriptive details. A broad diagonal crosses the chest from the left shoulder towards the right; the collar rises in angular, uneven planes. Across these dark passages, dull blue, brown and grey strokes slightly separate one surface from another. The body is built as a weight beneath the head, then allowed to recede so that the face remains the point of greatest activity.

The grey behind Boyer is no empty backdrop. At the left of his shoulder, a lighter patch makes the jacket’s contour legible. At the right, the background comes close to the coat’s own darkness, so that their border becomes a wavering line. The hat’s brim also behaves differently on its two sides: it projects decisively at left, then thins and darkens at right. Cézanne gives the surrounding space a job in constructing the figure. The sitter’s outline is made by changing relationships with the field around him, not by an unbroken drawn boundary.

Pavel Machotka describes the contrast of yellow hat, black hair and cool grey ground as an echo of Manet, while distinguishing Cézanne’s restless, bumpy line from Manet’s smoother handling. He also draws attention to the anchoring position of Boyer’s visible eye. ^[3] Seen against that reading, the painting’s attraction is the friction between a bold colour arrangement and a contour that will not settle into elegance. The hat catches attention quickly; the face slows it down.

The catalogue records a small red signature at the lower right. ^[2]

Boyer among Cézanne’s early sitters

John Elderfield places Cézanne’s early portraiture among pictures of people he knew, especially family and friends from Aix. He argues that these works retained the conventional still pose while radically changing the physical manner of painting it. ^[4] Boyer’s portrait makes that combination unusually clear. We are given a head and shoulders against a plain ground, a format that is easy to recognise, while the surface insists on visible construction rather than social finish.

Boyer appears in two other paintings identified by the online catalogue: a frontal portrait, FWN 427, and another head portrait, FWN 428. Both are dated around 1870, and both are oils on canvas. ^{[5] [6]}

The three works are distinct encounters with the same sitter. In the straw-hat painting, the broad brim almost becomes a second architecture for the head. It stages the meeting of a conspicuous accessory with the more difficult, pieced-together likeness beneath it.

The Met records an early self-portrait misidentification. ^[1] The catalogue lists Selbstbildnis among historical titles and a photograph annotated “Ch. Boyer, 1868” by Cézanne’s son. ^[2]

Date, material and journey to New York

Both records place it around 1870–71. ^{[1] [2]}

The support is an important fact about this particular object: Cézanne applied oil to paper that was mounted on canvas. ^[1]

The painted surface offers a compact field for large gestures. The crown is built with sweeping yellow passages; the face with smaller, interrupted touches; the coat with broad dark planes. Those differences in scale make the relatively narrow format feel ample. At the top, the yellow paint spreads across the crown almost as a single event; below it, small changes of colour accumulate around the eye. The painting can be read in quick, large shapes or at the pace of those successive marks.

The catalogue traces the picture from Boyer (possibly a gift) through Vollard and Durand-Ruel to the Havemeyers in 1904. Mrs. Havemeyer bequeathed it to the Met in 1929. ^[2]

The painting appeared in Met and Paris exhibitions in the 1930s and the travelling Cézanne: The Early Years 1859–1872 exhibition of 1988–89. ^[2]