I thought I knew Cezanne’s work—I’ve been to several retrospectives of his paintings over the years (in the US and in France), and I’ve hiked and photographed the landscapes he loved around Aix-en-Provence. So I was genuinely surprised by the exhibit of his portraits at the National Gallery in Washington—60 paintings spanning his entire career and collected from many museums throughout the world. It doesn’t take long to realize that, just as his mountain landscapes aren’t about Mont-Ste-Victoire, his portraits aren’t about his sitters. The people in his paintings are subjects for his roving eye. He’s working out form and color relationships, and noting how each brushstroke relates to every other as he develops his pictorial vocabulary. And he’s certainly not interested in making his subjects look good! He usually painted only people he knew (including himself). I found his many portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet, especially moving. She always sits calmly in a chair (her dresses and the chairs seem to be the real subjects of the paintings) and glances away from her husband, her lips held in a determined line. But it is her hands that reveal her feelings—they are clasped together as if holding back all the energy she can’t release. She grudgingly accepts the long hours of sitting in front of her intense husband and tries not to show the disappointment she feels at the plainness of the face he paints. Her hands wait patiently.

Cézanne Portraits, National Gallery of Art, March 25 – July 8, 201