The Eternal Feminine

In the later 1870s, in the years he spent between Pontoise and Auvers in the orbit of Pissarro, Paul Cézanne painted a small group of allegories unlike anything else in his work of the decade — among them the Eternal Feminine, in which the theme of Woman enthroned above a crowd of male admirers is treated with a brutal, satirical directness that owes nothing to the Salon. The picture has been read as Cézanne’s meditation on the artist’s idolatry of the model, a subject he returned to in related compositions of the same years, and its emphatic, sculptural handling anticipates the distortions of his late bathers. The canvas remained in the artist’s studio and passed at his death to his son Paul, a history that places it among the most personal of his figure pieces. The painting is held in the J. Paul Getty Museum.