Portrait of Victor Chocquet sitting FWN 439 1877 46cm x 38
On the 16th May 1877, Leon Gambetta spoke the following words to the French Parliament in support of a vote of no confidence brought by 363 deputies (MP’s): “When France will have its sovereign voice heard, then one will have to submit himself or resign”. He aimed these words at the French President, who had tried to prorogue parliament. A few months later, the French President resigned.
The French have, with good reason I believe, always prided themselves at the thoroughness of their Revolution. The American Revolution unfolded as a Republican system; but allowed slavery to continue for 100 years after, and the legality of racial discrimination for 200 years. The English Revolution accepted a parliamentary system, without a constitution, but retained a Royal dynasty, (the British are subjects, not citizens; to be a citizen, you have to live in a republic), a hereditary privileges system (The Lords), and until the 20th Century, a system whereby the eldest son inherited all wealth. The French Revolution abolished all privileges whatsoever, seeking that social order be based on equality of rights and opportunities. And that’s also one of the reasons why, as one of the first acts of the new Republic, France introduced a comprehensive, and for the time, very advanced, and by 1875, even progressive, system of taxation. Taxation was to be one of the ways, along with education, whereby a more just and equitable society would emerge. Unlike today, taxation was seen as a means to re-distribute wealth to those in need.
Victor Chocquet was a tax inspector, and proud of it. He was the son of a cotton merchant. He was born in Lille, a city port right in the north east border of France. Not a pretty town, but a working city – cotton, coal, steam engines, the new railway line to Paris; lots of bars and clubs. The city chose the first socialist Mayor, Gustave Delory, in all of France in 1886. One of the 363 deputies was the future Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, who through his friendship with Monet was one of the circle of acquaintances within the Impressionist group. Lille was where the good Dr Gachet was born too, who, when he moved to Auvers, used to hold a free surgery in the slums of Paris.
It’s a great portrait of Victor Chocquet by his friend Paul Cezanne: it just captures his serene nature as well as his love of modern art, and its vibrantly colourful expression. The story goes that Victor and Cezanne would quite happily spend an afternoon contemplating a painting together, happily chatting away for hours; and yet, another story, when Cezanne was painting Victor’s portrait, taking days and days, often spending 20 minutes between each brush stroke, Cezanne would demand absolute silence, the whole time, without interruption.
On the occasion that Cezanne and Hortense legalized their relationship in the mid 1880’s, Victor wrote a letter to Cezanne which touched him deeply; we do not know what was written in the letter; we only have Cezanne’s words of reply: “I would have liked to have your serenity, which allows you to reach the desired end with certainty. Your good letter testifies to a great balance of human faculties.” Victor had two particular ‘faculties’ that balanced together in a way that just made him a beautiful person: deep intuition of people and gentle serenity. On that day when Renoir had introduced Victor to a work of Cezanne, Victor knew where Cezanne was coming from; and when they met, he knew that here was something for him to cherish. They were close, like soul-mates; and it shows:
This painting makes me smile:
on the one hand it seems so serene. The guy is so at ease, at home in his study, surrounded by his zany wallpaper, in front of his wooden bureau, in his own padded chair, on his colourfully cluttered carpet, amongst his favourite paintings, legs lazily crossed, arm casually over the back of the chair, fingers gently interlocked, in his casual slip-on shoes, wearing his loose lounge suit, patiently gazing at his friend while Cezanne works with such intensity of the eye, and concentration of the mind, and steadiness of the hand, and passion of the heart.
on the other hand, it seems so edgy. The three paintings on the wall behind are none complete, and so blurred as to be unidentifiable; the writing desk is obscured by the human figure; the central figure is interrupted by the arm of the chair; and his head and one foot do not fit into the canvass. No single object in the painting is complete in outline.
The horizontals of the paintings, desk, floor, are interrupted by the figure of the man; and these horizontals are interrupted by the vertical of the chair on which he sits – indeed here is the rift in the painting: - the edge of the floor to the left does not meet up with the edge of the floor to the right. This allows Cezanne to swivel the chair around to the right. This is how the serenity and the edginess are brought together; this rift down the vertical of the painting allows Cezanne to put the human figure in that serene and edgy place. We do not notice that the chair seat has too much cushion considering the human figure sat on it: he is not such a tall and thin man that he only takes such little space on the seat cushion.
“No object is complete, and several obscure; everything is cut somewhere, even the figure, intercepted by the chair and the upper canvas edge; the dense fabric of paint has a constructed look; yet the whole is a convincing image of light and atmosphere and intimate suggestions of a particular time and place.” Says the author of many a book on Cezanne, Shapiro. The portrait brings Victor’s serenity and Cezanne’s edginess into a harmony that expresses the gentle intimacy of a particular time and place: when the two friends happily spent hours in silence in each other’s company.
“The location of an artist's inner tenacity is a mysterious balancing act. Artists pick and choose what to love and how to work; they manufacture their own cutting edge, sometimes in rebellion against what is fashionable. In the long run, we might all learn from Cezanne, who signed his letters “Non Finito,” or sometimes "Pictor semper virens" (ever-green painter). No real artist is ever finished.”
Russo Lee Gallery 2014
But real action is in silent moments.
The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts
of our choice of a calling,
our marriage,
our acquisition of an office, and the like,
but in a silent thought by the wayside as we walk;
in a thought which revises our entire manner of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson