Young Man and Skull (Jeune homme à la tête de mort)

Discussion

FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

A young man leans on his elbow in a pose recalling Renaissance representations of Melancholia, one of the four humors. He gazes past the skull resting on the table across from him, perhaps pondering his own mortality. Although skulls appear in some of Cézanne's early canvases—they were a common studio prop with a long history in still-life painting—the 1897 death of his mother and his own declining health might have prompted a late return to this symbolically loaded object.

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