Uncle Dominique in a Tasseled Cap

A blue cap leans across the top of this portrait, its dark tassel hanging beside Dominique Aubert’s face. Below it, a pale, loosely drawn smock opens around a dense black waistcoat, while a small red cravat catches the eye at the throat. The man is recognisable, but his clothes have almost the force of a second subject: their broad shapes make the portrait move before we begin to examine his expression.

The sitter was Cézanne’s maternal uncle. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates this painting to 1866 and identifies its blue tasseled cap and robe. Its portrait of Dominique dressed as a monk is a separate canvas. ^[1]

A costume built from opposing shapes

The cap sits at a conspicuous angle. A bright band curves over the forehead, a blue-green strip follows its upper edge, and the tassel ends in a small black weight. Across the lower half of the canvas, the smock moves in the opposite direction: its right side slopes outward and down, making the seated body seem wider than the head. The two movements hold the figure in place without a chair, tabletop or architectural setting. Even the neutral background takes part, pressing close to the silhouette rather than opening a room behind him.

Pavel Machotka reads this portrait as one of the two largest in the Uncle Dominique group. In his object-specific commentary, the plain black-and-white foundation lets the red neckcloth register against the green in the cap. He also sees the cap’s leftward inclination balanced by the movement of the white coat toward the right. That reading helps explain why the apparent speed of the strokes does not dissolve the composition: the strong directions of clothing and head remain legible across the entire canvas. ^[3]

Look closely at the face and the economy becomes more intricate. A dark eyebrow and eye socket arrive as abrupt, compact marks; a patch of light seems to catch the bridge and tip of the nose. The moustache and pointed beard produce a broken dark ring around mouth and chin. These areas are visibly more compressed than the wide pale passages of the garment. Cézanne gives the viewer enough separate features to identify a person, then makes those features compete with the broad, almost abstract construction of his clothes.

The smock is especially active near the left shoulder, where bright folded planes come forward against the gray. Its lower portions are less tidy: thick short strokes gather and separate, leaving the edge of the black central shape irregular. The waistcoat absorbs light and makes the neckcloth more vivid. This is a portrait in which a tiny patch of red can command attention because so much of the surrounding area is held to black, cream and gray. The result depends as much on distribution as on colour itself.

The surface makes its own argument

The Met describes Cézanne applying paint to coarse canvas with a palette knife; its audio commentary associates the soft cap with local peasants. The garment’s uneven ridges and scraped edges are visible paint as well as depicted fabric. ^[1]

Some areas seem carved into shape by light arriving at the edge of a stroke. The face is neither smoothly blended nor uniformly rough: flat pale marks sit beside dark cuts, while the neck and garment are assembled at another scale. That change of scale gives the head its intensity. It also keeps the viewer moving between a convincing human presence and the separate pieces that create it. The gray ground, dragged in varying directions, refuses to be a blank backdrop; it shares the hand-worked character of the figure.

John Elderfield places the Uncle Dominique portraits among Cézanne’s forceful studio portraits of 1866–67. He argues that their restricted tones and abrupt contrasts have something in common with contemporary photographs, even though the swollen paint and conspicuously unsmoothed surface resist photography’s finish. His comparison opens a useful way of seeing this canvas: the direct encounter with one sitter is repeated as an image, while each new surface makes a different pictorial event from that encounter. ^[4]

Where the cap crosses the forehead, its pale edge nearly joins the lit flesh beneath. The boundary is perceptible because hue, direction and texture shift, rather than because a continuous drawn line seals it. Under the chin, by contrast, the black vest and beard almost merge. Cézanne can make one border porous and another emphatic within a few inches of canvas. This varying pressure is one reason the figure looks substantial despite the speed suggested by the marks.

One sitter, many appearances

A contemporary witness helps fix the pace of this experiment. In a letter to Émile Zola dated 2 October 1866, Antony Valabrègue joked about Cézanne’s heavily worked painting and said that the uncle served more often as a model; a new portrait appeared each afternoon. The Société Paul Cezanne’s chronology transcribes the letter and lists nine portraits associated with Dominique, while noting that one sitter identification bears a question mark. ^[5]

The recurring sitter made costume unusually consequential. In this painting the tasseled cap and loose light garment broaden Dominique into a working figure; elsewhere he appears in a monk’s habit, a turban or other headwear. A Christie’s essay on a different Uncle Dominique portrait names this canvas specifically as the example with a tasseled hat and smock. It also notes that the ownership of the various garments is unknown. ^[6]

Each change of clothing alters the proportions available to the painter. A close cap confines the top of a head; this expansive one gives it a sloping extension. A dark habit can unify a body; here the pale outer garment splits apart around the central black. The portrait therefore tests likeness against alteration. Dominique’s eyes, nose and beard hold his identity while the surrounding structure proposes another social appearance. Looking from one version to another, we can follow what stays constant and what Cézanne is willing to remake. ^[6]

The National Gallery of Art places the Uncle Dominique pictures among the family portraits through which Cézanne began to paint sitters in earnest in 1866. It identifies Aubert as a bailiff. That occupation gives the light smock an added ambiguity: it can suggest an artisan without documenting what Dominique wore at work. The apparent worker is a staged appearance whose credibility comes from paint, pose and the sitter’s unmistakable face. ^[7]

A portrait with changing names

The work has not always been labelled as the artist’s uncle. The online catalogue raisonné records titles including L’Homme à la blouse blanche , Man in a Blue Cap (Uncle Dominic) and Self Portrait . It also records different proposed dates. Each title directs the first glance toward clothing, identity or supposed self-representation. ^[2]

At the 1907 Salon d’Automne retrospective it appeared as L’Homme à la blouse blanche ; a 1921 Met exhibition listed it as Portrait of the Artist , and a 1929 MoMA exhibition called it Self Portrait . The catalogue traces it through Ambroise Vollard, Auguste Pellerin, Marius de Zayas and Lillie P. Bliss before its passage through MoMA to the Met. The likeness circulated while its sitter’s identity remained unsettled. ^[2]