Gustave Boyer (b. 1840) in a Straw Hat

Early twentieth-century scholars identified this man with mutton-chop sideburns as Cézanne himself, but he is actually the artist’s boyhood friend Gustave Boyer, a lawyer who sat for two other portraits around 1870–71. The painterly surface of this canvas, the liberal use of black and gray, and the boldly realized forms are typical of Cézanne’s work at the time.