Gardener (Le Jardinier)

Gardener (c.1885) at the Barnes Foundation is one of a series of figure studies depicting workers at the Jas de Bouffan estate — the family property near Aix-en-Provence that Cézanne's father had purchased in 1859 and where Cézanne worked until its sale in 1899. The gardener subjects occupy an unusual position in his oeuvre, which tends toward either the isolated studio model, the family member serving as patient sitter, or the imagined bather figure. Contemporary working-class figures in landscape were more typically the domain of Millet, Pissarro, and the Barbizon tradition; Cézanne transforms them by applying his structural geometric method to the laboring figure as he would to a geological formation. By 1885 Cézanne had definitively parted from his Impressionist contemporaries and was developing his independent method in systematic isolation. The dignified stillness of these worker figures contrasts with both the sentimentality of Millet's peasant imagery and the social commentary of Courbet.

The gardener's figure is built with the same diagonal, planar strokes that Cézanne applies to landscape. The human form is simplified into geometric volumes—cylindrical torso, rounded head—without loss of characteristic presence. The Provençal landscape around the figure uses warm ochres and greens in systematic structural notation.